


The Summer of Blood and the Bridle

by Sectionladvivi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Violence, Equestrian, F/F, High Fantasy, Murderhorses, No Lesbians Die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 57,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22166911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sectionladvivi/pseuds/Sectionladvivi
Summary: It was a horse, and yet not a horse. It was as if one of our placid lorheads had been mated to a great serpent. It was the kind of guise God might have put on if He wanted to walk the world as a horse, for it was unearthly in its beauty. Every sharp edge and narrow part of it was perfect. A single wrong angle would have turned it to catastrophe, but its bones and its muscles were assembled without flaw. It was, in every strand of its mane, and every twitch of its muscle, sublime in a defiance of possibility. It was a witch and an angel conspiring in the skin of a horse.Here, in this place, life lived lacking God, and it had created terrible perfection.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 37





	1. the girl with no name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Honor your protectors, either bound by [social] law or by blood born, and seek peace with them. Obey their wishes, and be pleasing to them, unless the covenant of peace by broken by their hand._
> 
> -the First Book of the Sundial as translated by Aidanan Blay

My mother named me Husk, because she was too preoccupied with the corn to name a third daughter, one who was smaller and unassuming from birth, never crying or doing anything suspicious, and easily forgotten about. It was a good enough name for one child in a mess of seven. Three sisters and three brothers. In a row, my sisters were Heather, Hazel, and the youngest was Hornet. The boys were Badger, Bluegrass, and Blessing. Good temporary names for a mess of seven black-haired brats who didn’t know who they were yet, or what they were going to be.

My name is Alto now, and I play the violin. Sometimes I miss being Husk. Husk was a strong kid with clothes ratty from the woods, mottled always with bruises, deft at climbing trees and sometimes climbing atop one of the milder-mannered dairy cows to mount the hills with the herd, and from there she watched the sun rising over the distant, deadly mountain peaks.

Sometimes I dream about those mountains (I can name them still: the Dragonhead, the Torchspine, the Widow with Tears, oh, but what are the others...?). But then I wake up, eat my oatmeal with honey and cut pears, and a servant boy with deft hand braids my hair, and someone dresses me in my favorite blue wisp of a dress, and my nails are polished. I am as much chattel as those mild-mannered cows I once tended, but I have everything, and I have Gannon.

Gannon is, oh, the fifth daughter of the second son of the third Family, and they aren’t in any kind of power, but they are rich.

I am eighteen and I have been playing for Gannon since I was sixteen. She is only a little older than me, but privately, I think she has never aged and never will. I have memorized everything about her and she is exactly the same girl whose eyes found me (just me) in the cascade of children in the orchestra, and said, “Yes, her, the one with the dark hair.”

Gannon has yellow hair, and always will. She has sad grey eyes, though she is always smiling. She has no color in her lips or in her cheeks. She is exactly like one of the weeping marble angels that line the garden. She wears black as often as she wears blue, and she is drowned by any color, and forgotten in the brilliant flowers in her hair, but I never forget.

She is beautiful and I love her. I think she knows; she must know. I drown out all the voices in our quartet with the loud courting of my violin. I sing her praises with it, much too loud, like the insistent birds outside my bedroom window. I disregard all the delicacy of my instruction. I am careless. I am inspired. I think that’s why my exasperated quartet tolerates my brazen playing; the more desperately I play, the more plaintive the sound, the more it trembles, as if at any moment it will break into screech or silence, and yet it never does, and I let every note hang in the air, as if hoping Gannon will reach out and pluck it like a fruit.

She never does. She must know I love her, and yet she sits in silence and only listens.

I am eighteen, and halfway through the second book of the Sundial, and it tells me that by now I ought to marry. I have that right.

And oh, she loves to torment me with that fact.

“How old are you now, Alto?” she asked me, as we walked the garden. She knew perfectly. She knew well enough to continue without an answer, quoting, “‘A good age to marry is eighteen, nineteen, twenty, or twenty one. Any younger is much too young, any older suggests sloth or too great a love for freedom.’“

“You think I have too great a love for freedom?” I asked, pretending indignation.

Gannon plucked a handful of blossoms from a tree as we passed underneath, and scattered them playfully at me. “To a fault!” She laughed. “I see how you watch the gates and long for the passing caravans. Given your druthers you would be a sunlanded traveler, or a bandit, I think.”

“I would rather bear arms than children,” I said, brushing petals from my skirts with dignity.

“You are an immoral character,” she said, but with admiration, and with affection.

“Immoral characters make the best violinists,” I said. “And the worst wives.”

“You know I wouldn't keep you,” she said. She stopped halfway across the bridge, to lean upon it and gaze down at the blue stream. I stopped when she stopped, looked down into the water, and tried to spot the little silver fish. Garden trees guarded the source of the stream, whose mouth I knew ran from outside the manor property, and yes, I had followed it all the way to the gates! It was true, I was restless. I am restless. Always.

“You may go home, if you like,” said Gannon. “Find a farmboy you knew from your childhood, perhaps? A drover’s son? Better yet, a young blacksmith, who shoes the lorheads of the wealthy as they pass through the village.”

I stared at her silhouette, where she was framed against the blue sky, the same blue as my dress. I imagined going home in that blue frippery, imagined taking it off and donning the- the- whatever it was that the wife of a blacksmith wore.

“Everything I want is here,” I said.

Gannon turned, and she reached for me, and clasped my hands.

We stood alone upon the bridge.

A strand of her yellow hair had come loose from its neatly braided crown. I longed to undo it all, to see how long her hair really was, and to wind my fingers in its softness, to count it strand by strand, hour by hour.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, at once sounding very somber. “I would never send you away. The city is your home now as much as it is mine.” She met my eyes as she had that first time we met, seeing me as a girl, or a woman, and not an instrument. “I know many sons of the city, many with similar estates; any of them would marry you. Even if you are a shepherd and bandit at heart.”

I pulled my hands away from her, and scowled at her laughing face. “You’re cruel,” I accused.

“I would never send you away, but you are welcome to leave your cruel mistress, if you like.” There was mischief in her eyes— and she called me the bandit!

I forgave her teases, as I always did and always would, and we celebrated my birthday with the other girls and young women of the estate. We draped blankets upon the lawn, posted with parasols, and plagued by small dogs gamboling about and trying to steal bits of cake. The white walls and wreathed colonnades of the main house framed the scene. Willow trees hid the tall gates, giving the illusion of vast freedom in the countryside, and contributing to the illusion lay Gannon, with her head resting in my lap. She had finally undone the great mass of her bound hair and abandoned her shawl, and I ran my fingers through her hair at last. So preoccupied, I almost missed the murmurs of the other girls— but Gannon did not.

She opened one eye against the sunlight. “Faran, what did you say?”

Faran, the cellist with the enormous dark eyes and darker complexion, dressed today in pale green, covered her mouth. The pied hound (he would grow enormous some day, but now he was only a puppy, and a clumsy fat one) stole the last of her cake and began to sneeze peach frosting.

“I heard a rumor,” said Faran, looking pleased to be the source of it. “That there is a night rider boarding here, in the city.”

“Impossible,” said Yane, the ever surly, chestnut-headed flutist. “The sun has been out for weeks, and it’s more than a day’s ride to forest cover.”

“Not for one of Them,” said Faran, and most of the girls fell quiet. They knew very little about Them— just enough to be wary of the reference. “Have you ever seen one at full speed?”

“No, and neither have you.” Yane was cross.

“I have,” said Faran. She was usually a jovial girl, but now she was somber, something in her expression harkening back to whatever child she had been before the convents and the estates. I had never learned where she came from, I realized. Faran rarely spoke of her youth. “On the Black Way, headed north to Yekaterin.”

Every gaze was riveted, every pair of lips, slightly parted.

Faran was no longer enjoying her gossip; she was seeing something distant now, gazing into memory, into something she had thought forgotten. “It was taller than any living thing I’d ever seen. It appeared on the horizon, and then it was past, and over the hill before I could even see it. I didn’t hear a sound. Its hooves might have never touched the ground, it was that fast.”

I was silent, and not as rapt as the others. I looked down at Gannon, who had closed her eyes. Was she listening? She looked as though she may have fallen asleep, just dropped away in the sunlight. I didn’t want to hear stories of night riders and superstitious creatures.

It reminded me too much of my mother. My mother, and my nights on the hills, watching the mountaintops.  


_'And they came from the mountains, those crawling things, hungry for blood and for human touch…’_

“It’s true,” said Gannon suddenly. “The rider’s name is Khoeveld. I offered him our hospitality. He refused very politely. I don’t know the nature of his Beast, but he is a good man, and he does his duty well.”

She opened one sly eye.

“Would you like to meet him?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, it's back! I've been feeling really disturbed lately about the world, about climate change and war and all of it, and dealing with a lot of anxiety just in my life. I keep getting scared that I'm going to get in a car accident on my daily commute and die and nobody will have read the ending of this book. That thought bothers me a lot. I don't want to die with this story still in me. Many people said the story meant something to them, enough people that I thought, 'I should take this offline and finish it, and try to have it published'. I've been taking to agents about other work, but putting TSOBATB on the shelves is a 'maybe' with an estimate of years behind it. I don't want to wait to share this story with the people who really loved it. I feel like I owe everyone an ending, and I want to be in this world again, and not in mine.
> 
> I may update this gradually, piece by piece, editing as I go, or I may dump it all on ao3 over the course of a week. Probably somewhere in the middle. I do want to polish a few parts and smooth out some inconsistencies... and I still have to write the ending. But it will come.
> 
> Thank you all for reading, thank you everyone who drew art and left comments before.
> 
> formal dedication:  
> bianca. zeke. toto. river. skye. bambi. watermelon. emery.


	2. she bites

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The first horses were out of Hell, and they were all born black, and aged to the color of bone, and they had yellow teeth and dined like wolves._
> 
> -the Fifth and Unread Book of the Sundial as translated by Aidanan Blay

I couldn’t have been the only one who dreaded meeting Khoeveld, but if I was, I was a silent minority. I defended myself internally by thinking, 'Isn't it rude, the way they propose to gawk at him?', but I knew those weren't my real misgivings. What I was disturbed by was my own eagerness. In place of my absent mother, I chided myself for it, quoting the Sundial: _‘The things we most want are the things we should be most wary of.’_ It was only a warning for a child from the first book, to inspect your intentions and be an obedient child, but in my case, the excerpt applied more literally.

I didn’t care about the man.

I wanted to see the beast.

Oh, my mother would have hated me right now.

The other girls waited for their mounts to be curried, tacked, adorned, and brought to them. Myself, I begged a lost earring and slipped away to seek out my Delilah.

She was tall for a lorhead, taller even than Gannon’s yellow gelding (yellow to match her hair), at a neat fourteen hands. She was a biscuit dun, with sweet dark eyes and lashes as big as butterfly wings. She had a white snip on her perfectly soft and whiskery nose, and an evil spirit.

“She bit three of the boys,” Gannon had said with pride, when presenting her to me. “She leads like a mule and rides like a wagon with three wheels. Do you like her?”

I loved her.

It had taken Gannon weeks to find the perfect pony to satisfy my ‘bandit’ spirit. Before Delilah, I had ridden a sad little yellow gelding. He had been meek as a mouse, forever mourning at my heels and looking pitifully at me as I took his reins from a stablehand. Gannon had wanted us to match, but after a month of seeing that cloud over my head, and hearing me sighing as heavily as my horse when it was time to trek down to the docks, Gannon had passed that sad lad on to Yane, and then I had Delilah.

Our first ride, she had ripped the reins out of my hands and streaked headlong down the streets with devilish purpose. We had scattered townsfolk, she had dodged between carriages, and ultimately she had reached the end of the docks, and plunged into the water as if she had been stolen from them and was returning home. Utterly pleased with herself, she had swum in circles until a fisherman lured her to shore with the wiggling promise of fresh fish. There, Gannon had eventually come upon this sight: I, wringing out my ruined gown, Delilah, with her head deep in the herring barrel.

I don’t think Gannon had ever laughed that hard in her life.

“Hello, button,” I said. At once, Delilah’s head popped out of her stall with a throaty whicker. She bobbed her head until I was within reach, then searched my pockets with a vengeance.

“Not today, love,” I said, capturing her head and cradling it in my arms. It was an annoyance she had learned to tolerate only after I wore her down with my persistence. From this vantage point only could I whisper my secrets, and I did often, and she kept them well—for she had a good heart, under all the wickedness.

“We’re going to see a man of the nightmount today,” I told her. “He rides on an evil thing. Yes, wickeder than you. You know I don't like gossip — I only want to hear horrible and the scandalous stories if they’re true — But I’ll tell you what they said. One of the girls," I paused for dramatic effect. "She said that these evil things have scales instead of skin, horns instead of ears, and no eyes. Instead, they have two dark pits — an extra pair of nostrils mounted high on the head, to better sniff out blood. Isn’t that silly?”

Delilah blew out air as if in agreement.

“I’ll also tell you what my mother said, but you must swear to share it with no one." I combed aside her forelock to better whisper in her ear.

“She told me that they had fair faces, and all the colors of the flowers among them, for they were born when God’s palette was still rich, and He was zealous.”

Delilah snorted her skepticism.

“See, what’s what I thought.”

-

I rode alongside Gannon and her yellow Tulipe, and she and I and Faran and Yane and the rest of them all plodded down the streets in a procession of ribboned mane and polished hooves. Delilah, her mane braided with daisies, had taken a break from trying to spit out her bit and was flirting with Gannon’s gelding. He was having none of it.  
Shopkeepers, carriage drivers, and familiar city folk all nodded their hellos as we passed. Running children stopped to gawk at the finery of the tack and the horses. One or two men tossed appreciative flowers (did they just carry those around, hoping for her to pass?) on the cobbles before Gannon’s mount for her to ride across. She gave them courteous nods, and when they were out of sight, glanced at me and lifted her eyes to high heaven.

The night rider was boarded with Harmonium Blay, the master of town fishermen and owner of half the docked ships of the city. He had a manor of his own, but without a great fence in lawn and garden traipse as we had. He didn’t need them for he had the whole of the sea.

I liked him.

Harmonium Blay (no relation to the scholar, as far as I knew) was an enormous, black-skinned man, never unsmiling, and today was no exception. He himself met us in the courtyard, which was dominated by an enormous fountain of leaping stone dolphins. He was dressed as if he were fresh off some skiff, which he very well may have been. For all his wealth, he felt no need and had no desire to sit around fat and happy. I envied his freedom not to do so.

A widower with six sons, he was always delighted to see our feminine hoard descend upon his home.

“If it isn’t my pack of absent daughters,” he announced us to himself, hands on hips. “Come to visit dear dad before his burial at sea?”

“‘Herd’ of daughters,” corrected Gannon, as he helped her graciously off her Tulipe. His staff scuttled quickly forward to help us do the same. “And I’m afraid we won’t be staying long, ‘Father’, I’ve only come to satisfy the morbid curiosity of my sisters.”

He grimaced and looked up over us, at his home and its many windows, open-shuttered to the sea air. He was eyeing one in particular. “Ah, you’ve come to see Khoeveld.”

“Indulge us,” said Gannon.

“I have no objection —anything for your gracious company — but I’m afraid he’s gone out, and I don’t know where to or when he’ll return. However, I can host you until he does. I have some fresh imports. Would you like tea, coffee? It’s straight off the ship this morning.”

“You just want to ply me with trade goods until I agree to marry one of your sons,” accused Gannon.

“Could you fault me?” Harmonium grinned down at her (he was a truly enormous man) with great fondness. “But, I promise you, no plying. May the men take your ponies?”

The men moved to do so, and I intercepted one of them just as Delilah’s teeth clacked together inches from his shirtsleeve. Harmonium and Gannon both looked my way. “I’ll make sure they’re put away properly,” I volunteered. “And join you after.”

Gannon nodded, with only a moderately disapproving frown. She knew I wanted a look at the stables more than to supervise my little dun maneater. I was always sniffing around barns out of some inborn dissatisfaction. I was always seeking the places that smelled like my memories, and this memory, of freshly baled hay where little Husk had slept, was a particular and recurring need. Little Husk was after that sleep still, so I did what I could to steal that smell away, and save it for my dreams.

The stablehand eyed me and my skirts with male misgivings, but made a courtly gesture still and showed me the way. I followed with Delilah at my heels, nipping at the laces on the back of my dress.

Harmonium’s stable was enormous. He had a personal horse or two, but the vast multitudes of rows and arching passages were dedicated to housing to whatever horseflesh was passing through the city, as needed. Sometimes I spotted odd imports. One of his sons was a racer, and he had once acquired a small herd of very ugly sprinters. One ugly, rainy morning, I had witnessed the unloading and putting away of several exotically striped duns. These rare horses surfaced only occasionally. Mostly there were lorheads, a stall after stall after stall rainbow array of dun, yellow, gray, bay, and black, and here a spotted shoulder, there, a spotted back.

There was nothing unusual in the stalls today.

I held Delilah while one of the men untacked her. When he opened a stall door with a polite wave of ‘here you are’, I said “Thank you,” in a pointed enough way that he raised his eyebrows, cleared his throat, and bob-head-bowed his way out of the row.

I had learned that tone from Gannon.

I put Delilah away. She immediately set to the flake of hay left for her, and I leaned over the stall door to enjoy her enthusiasm. I was happiest when she was happy, and she was happiest when she was up to her ears in hay.  
One of her braids had lost its daisy and begun to unravel.

“Lost?”

I looked to my right.

The man who had spoken was not a stablehand. He wasn’t dressed like one. He wore simple black and brown riding gear, and a white shirt with an open collar. His hair was dark, and short, but clumsily cut in a way that made it look unruly and cowlicked.

He was leaning on the next stall door over, looking at the horse and not at me. He was not looking at me in a very loud way, the way I loudly did not look at the looming guard dogs of the dock as I passed them by, or very loudly did not look at a spooky pony when it got loose and started chewing on waterlilies by the stream and I was trying to catch it.

“Lost?” I repeated.

He gave me half a look, a painfully polite one. I was taken aback by his eyes. They were beautiful eyes, for a man—dark, with uncreased lids and long eyelashes, but they had enormous purple shadows beneath them. He noted my surprise with a wan smile.

“I saw the rest of the ladies go up to the house,” he said. “Why didn’t you go with them?”

It was a very blunt question, from a strange man to a strange girl, but I could see by his face that he had no idea he might be rude. There was no ill intent in his eyes. In fact, there was no intent of any kind.

“You like your pony,” he concluded, before I could answer. He searched my face, found his conclusion to be true, and seemed both surprised and pleased by the truth.

_This man,_ I thought. _Is starved for conversation._ He spoke as if he had never had one. Any of the other girls would have dismissed him, either in anger, or in shyness. He was lucky to have found the bold one of the group, for I would speak to him. Secretly, I would speak to anyone. I knew more names about town than I ought to have known, for a girl who lived in an estate, and played the violin.

“I had to bring her in,” I said.

“Had to?” he repeated, almost hopefully. He was still leaning on his stall and barely looking at me again, but he grinned into it.

“She bites.”

“She bites!” he exclaimed, and clapped a hand to his mouth. It took me a moment to realize he was holding in laughter. More perplexed than vexed, I waited him out. It wasn’t really funny, except to Gannon, when Delilah happened to pluck a ribbon from a hat, or pinched a stable boy’s bottom and sent him running.

“I’m sorry,” he said, uncovering his laughter. He looked at his hand, now, instead of looking at me. “You see, my pony bites too.”

My mother’s words came back to me for the second time that day. _‘And they came from the mountains… hungry for blood and for human touch…'_

“You’re Khoeveld,” I said.

He plucked at a bit of hay caught in the stall latch.

“Yes,” he said.

Neither of us had to finish the explanation of what he was or how I knew his name.

My mother’s memory tried to stop me, but no use. I blurted out, “Is it true that they have horns?”

The night rider finally faced me directly. It struck me how unusually mild he seemed— as mild as the gelding Delilah had replaced, full of an obvious and everpresent caution. The advice of ‘careful’ rolled off of him in waves. I found myself confused, and even frustrated. I scanned his bare forearms for toothmarks, his fingers for old rope burns, anything. I found nothing but skin that looked milder than a sailor’s. His hands closely resembled that of the maid who stitched my clothing. His only muscle was lean, and he had little of it. The only disarming thing about him was the depth of the shadows under his eyes. How much monster could a monster be, if this man could possess it?  
Khoeveld didn’t answer the question. Instead, he asked,

“Would you like to see?”

-

There was a subsection in the back of the stable that I had never seen lit or used. There were always bales of hay stacked on either side of the entrance, and I had always assumed that beyond them was storage, and forgotten and disused things.

As the night rider led me past the bales and into the dark, I saw by his flickering light that I was partially correct. Where there had been box stalls, walls had been taken out to house old carriages. The paint was peeling from them and their wheels were broken. I saw discarded pitchforks with bent tines. There were barrels, full or empty of what, I had no idea, and they lined the walls. The light whispered over them periodically. Mostly the light lapped the floor, illuminating old, weathered seastone. The light climbed only halfway up the walls, where dusty spackle covered old brick. Invisible birds were alarmed into invisible flight overhead.

We continued, and the many discarded things became fewer discarded things, until we were passing nothing. There were still stalls, but many barriers between them had been taken down, creating stalls which were more like pens. They could have housed three or four lorheads apiece, and very comfortably so. They were all of them empty.

Then Khoeveld stopped. He put his hand out towards me, but without touching, making a barrier of his motion, and of a single word.

“Look.”

His light fell short of the very last box.

“In the dark.”

My eyes saw only black. In this old and cavernous part of Blay’s stable, it may as well have been moonless night.

I smelled it first.

The smell was the sweetness of old iron, and the promise of rust.

I smelled it, and then I heard it. I heard it breathing.

I knew horses well enough to know their breathing. I knew how it felt against my arm, leaning on Delilah as I hand grazed her in the night, and as I stared off into the well-guarded darkness of the lawn, wishing it full of mystery. I knew her chest expanding against my ribs. I knew how it felt against my legs under saddle. I knew how a single, deep sigh from Delilah went through her whole body, pushed out my calves, lifted me up on the inhale and then carried me back down. I knew how long it took for her to breathe out, to breathe in, and to fill her lungs again.  
The creature in the dark took a breath, and I took my own, too. I counted the seconds it took. As I did, I pictured the lungs filling, sides widening, back raising. It kept taking the same soft, unending breath. In my mind, the imagined feeling of those spreading sides kept growing, the capacity of the lungs kept expanding, and the size of the beast kept scaling upwards, and I tried to follow it, until my lungs were too full and I could breathe no more, and my heart was pounding, and my head was filled with the impossibility of its size.

My eyes had adjusted.

I saw it now.

The beast stood with its head out the door, and it had an alien, convex profile. I could see the outline of a silently working jaw.

It was gargantuan in a way that was primordial, like the gilded mammoth skull that hung in the great hall at the estate house. Creatures like these didn’t live outside the valley, and now I knew why in a way that was instinctive, not historical: they were too alien. Too old. They were never meant to live among us, or us among them. They came from an incomprehensible world, where God was zealous, _'where life was as beautiful and cruel as He had intended it to be, where life did not pause for Man, nor bend its head for rope or iron...'_

It could have tossed its head and struck the ceiling.

Khoeveld gave a low whistle, but the beast didn’t move.

It already knew we were here.

He whistled again—a soft, uneasy tune, and I could almost feel my hand coiled around the neck of my violin. I could almost feel my fingers barely touching the strings to ply a thin and silvery harmonic. It was an aching, shivering sound.

The beast turned its head.

I saw the great neck extend like a serpent, and then it opened its mouth, and I heard teeth click, and it creaked back. It wasn’t a whinny. It wasn’t a whicker. It was a sound like an ancient door struggling to open. The creak deepened into a mechanical warble— a rapid clicking that I felt more than heard. Each bass note hit the back of my throat and tasted like blood. It tasted like the familiar, peculiar iron of my dreams.

_Mother, I’ve heard this song before._

“What?” said Khoeveld sharply.

Had I spoken aloud?

The beast’s mad clattering stopped abruptly, as if it had heard me too. It stared through the pitch air at us, and then it took a step forward, outside of its box.

There was no stall door.

My heart boomed, my blood fled into my ears, and I ran from the dark back of Harmonium’s stable, past the skeletons of carriages and rank barrels, and Khoeveld was calling “Wait!” and behind him the beast was cackling, cackling, and the taste of iron had swamped my mouth, and I felt sick, as sick as if I had a whole stomach full of blood.


	3. duel with the dragonhead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _A girl is at her most marriageable when the sun is strong and the nights are warm, and when nobody need fear things that thrive in darkness, for fear and shadow breed changeling children._  
>  -the Second Book of the Sundial as translated by Aidanan Blay

I raced Delilah back to the estate, abusing her hooves on the cobblestones and drawing stares. We blew past the butcher shop, the fruit stalls, the flowered obelisk, and they all passed me in a blur.

The mare must have sensed my urgency, for she didn't take the time to argue. She picked up her bit, tucked her head, and flew. She knew the way home and she carried me there. The concrete, familiar feeling of her was a heady relief. The warmth of her sides cut through the cold in me in a way that the summer sun could not.

By the time we clattered to a halt outside the gate, I could almost breathe again.

The usual guard was posted with a dog at her feet and a book in her hand. She looked up in surprise at our haste, and I tried to remember her name. Cole? Chetta?

The dog gave a wary ‘boof’.

“Alto?” She knew my name. I felt a ding of guilt, but was too shaken for shame. “What happened?” she asked. “Where are the others?”

“I took sick,” I said shortly. I could not and did not want to try and explain. I wanted to get inside, to put a wall between me and that creature.

She eyed the odd look of me, but unlatched the gate without a word except to shush the dog.

It was only after I handed Delilah over to a stableboy that I really began to regain my wits. Even sweet, snapping Delilah reminded me too much of what I had seen, and I found I couldn’t even bring myself to curry the drying sweat off of her. She bared her teeth at the boy, and for the first time, I flinched.

I recoiled from her.

I was horrified. What other safe and happy parts of me had the creature buried itself in?

I went to my room and buried myself in études, as if I could erase the events of the day with physical fatigue. My mother’s voice didn’t have to tell me it was a fool’s errand.

My life—a haze of rose syrup, silk gowns, and Gannon—felt as if it had been slit with a knife. The illusion of it billowed like curtains in a summer rain. I had never felt less like the girl named Alto. I watched myself play, and was apart from it. My fingers, trained into position, delicately buffed to a shine, were foreign to me. The blue gown, which had been my favorite, suddenly felt like an embarrassing costume. My braids felt too tight, and the knot of my hair lay too heavy on the back of my neck. Even the sound of my instrument was too rich, almost cloying, like dense cake caught in the throat.

I shifted suddenly down the neck into fifth, and descended into the familiar torrent of a winter piece: Faber’s violent concerto of the Dragonhead. I leapt immediately into the third movement and then to the center of that, to a place I knew too well. These six measures had plagued me as a student. Unwilling to let them defeat me, I took my violin out of the convent and into the night, under the stars where no one could hear or find me, and I did battle with the Dragonhead until I had mastered it.

When I returned to the convent, thrashed but triumphant, the Contemplative who opened the door and turned her light on me had screamed: the white sleeve of my nightgown was soaked with blood.

I had played the skin off of my fingertips.

But Faber had never challenged me again.

Now, I pummeled those six measures again, until I found the same confidence.

And then, without thinking about stopping, I stopped. My fingertips found a very specific, featherlight resting place, and I tapped out a soft harmonic on the A string.

I played Khoeveld’s soft and plaintive whistle.

I played it with only the smallest touch, for my ears only, but I imagined the beast hearing my call all the way from the docks. Despite myself, caught in the teeth of my own impulsive thoughts, I imagined waiting until night. I imagined opening my window. While the others slept, I would tie up the curtains, and take out my instrument, and I would play the notes just loud enough for the wind to carry them, and the beast would hear me, and it would come.

I let silence fall.

Was that how all the riders called their beasts? I wondered.

I don’t know how long I stood there, musing, with the violin dangling from my hand, before the door flew open and startled me. It rebounded off the wall and almost bounced back into the face of the one who had thrown it open.

Gannon caught and closed the door with much more dignity than she had opened it with. There was a hint of embarrassed rose in her cheeks. She was still wearing her riding boots, which was an anomaly. I knew her careful ritual of washing up and slipping into house slippers after a ride. The boots said what her return to a practiced calm tried to deny: she had rushed up here straight from her horse.

She dissected me with her eyes. “You left so suddenly,” she said. “And without a word. They told me you were ill.” She was angry.

Even still, seeing Gannon, I was overcome with relief. All my dread and my confusion felt like a dream that I was forgetting.

“Before you quote doctrine at me,” I said. “Let me tell you what happened.”

Seeing the consternation on my face, the anger on her face softened into worry. She sat down upon my bed in a billow of skirts and beckoned me to sit near her. “What did you do now, Alto?” There was the smallest hint of a tease underneath the concern.

I put down my violin and joined her, pulling my knees up to my chest in a very uncivil and conspiratorial way. I spoke quietly. She had to lean in close to me. “I spoke to Khoeveld.”

“Khoeveld,” she said, with surprise. “He’s no cause for alarm.”

“He showed me his horse.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “Was it…?” She trailed off, lacking a question, and looking at me, concluded: “It was frightening.”

I wanted to take advantage of her sympathy and rest my head on her shoulder. I wanted to be soft with her, there in the light, in my blue dress, in the warm hint of lilac she carried everywhere with her. If it was only a haze, if it was only a dream, it was a welcome one.

“Well, this makes the evening a sticky one,” she said, after letting me take my silence, looking amused by the turn the day had taken, and would take further still. “Because Khoeveld is coming for dinner.”

It was not my place to cull dinner guests, but I made a disgruntled face with my nose. She would allow that.

“He isn’t the only one.”

I looked at her askance, and she gave me a coyly identical look back.

“You know it was your birthday, and that we had cake, and that it was lovely.”

Now I was suspicious.

“But, we haven’t celebrated the real event,” she said, and I realized what was coming. “You have no elder sisters—no blood sisters, at least—and so you have no obligation to wait. You’re allowed your courtships. And since I know you won’t take initiative for yourself, and with Harmonium fussing so about his unmarried sons—”

“No,” I said, putting all manners aside, aghast.

“They’re coming as well. It was only polite, and it was appropriate. And I thought then, why not make an event of it? You aren’t the only one of age. Yune is in her second year. Bend’s sons will be there, and a daughter, and some from Huine, and some from Ute. There will be plenty of handsome boys, many of them strangers.”

“No,” I said again.

“There will be dancing,” she concluded with relish.

“You’re monstrous,” I said.

“As monstrous as that beast of Khoeveld’s?” She grinned, and leaned in close to me, in a different voice. “What was it like, really? I hear they are tall.”

“Very tall,” I acknowledged begrudgingly, knowing she was distracting me from the torment she had planned. "They smell like iron, more like a blacksmith than an animal."

"That's strange," she said, her curiosity was honest, but there was no apprehension in her face. There should have been. I knew that no matter what I said, nothing could express exactly the feeling of being in the dark with that ghastly thing. In that experience, I was alone. Even here in the light and the lilac smell with her.

"Well, will you put that part of the day be behind you?" She reached up to take an errant strand of my hair and tuck it away, brushing my cheek, speaking sweetly to me. "You need never see the creature again, and you needn't speak to Khoeveld tonight. He's leaving for the mountains at the end of the week."

"The mountains?" I repeated.

She shrugged. "He has business there, I suppose. I know not what business. What I do know is-" She lifted my chin, looked me over, and up and down, and continued in a faux-reprimand. "You are very poorly dressed for a party."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Khoeveld is pronounced Ko-eh-veld.
> 
> bonus note: Faber's concerto of the Dragonhead is based on Vivaldi's Winter. I spent a couple months trying to 'duel' with Vivaldi but I don't think Vivaldi is meant to be dueled with, or at least I never got anywhere with that approach. Or maybe I just suck at the violin lol. If you look up the first movement of Vivaldi's Winter you'll have a good idea of what I was going for. When I was first writing this story and didn't know where I was going with it, Vivaldi's Four Seasons were a huge inspiration and played a big part in the mood. In hindsight, I think the symmetry of Vivaldi's Four Seasons and the four books of the Sundial probably isn't a coincidence.


	4. a summer of blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _If ill dreams come, light a candle when you awake. If you dream of love, pick a flower and scatter the petals._  
>  -the Third Book of the Sundial as translated by Aidanan Blay

The air was lousy with persimmons, pear, and cinnamon, courtesy of Harmonium’s fresh imports and Gannon’s quick-thinking chefs. It was hard to tell what was food and what was perfume. It was equally difficult to discern between the chatter of the guests and the clumsy sound of the string quartet that had replaced my fellows and I.

Only Gannon was my calm constant, smiling demurely at me from across a plate of mandarin dragon, holding a glass of wine, turning it on its stem instead of drinking. She was dressed in a blackcurrant gown that pulled every ounce of color from her skin and annihilated it. Compared to the gilded masses, she had made herself plain, forgoing her usual finery for a single silver ring with a pearl set in it. Her yellow hair was braided into a simple crown.

I could smell her smoky lilac and vanilla on the dress she had insisted I wear. It was what she called her ‘red wine dress’, the one she loved most for parties and for making a spectacle of herself. It was a bare-armed, bare-shouldered gown with an arrogantly high waist and long twirling skirts. I knew by heart what it looked like on her. Wearing it felt at once embarrassing and exhilirating, like I was playing at being Gannon, or as if I was sneaking around inside of her skin.

Tonight, she had turned me into the spectacle.

It had taken at least an hour for the servants to satisfy her as she fussed over everything from the gold-lacing in my plaits to the rings on my fingers. She had slipped every ring on herself, carefully, then slid our fingers to interlink them and smiled up at me. “You’re beautiful,” she said, with unquestionable authority. “You will be the most beautiful one there, prettier than any boy or girl. No, don’t argue with me!” I shut my mouth. “I know what you want to say, ‘Oh no, Gannon, I couldn’t possibly be more beautiful than you’, but I won’t have it! If you call me beautiful, I’ll confine you to your rooms, and you’ll miss your own party.”

Her voice was severe. Her eyes danced.

“Of course,” I demured. “However, come to think of it, I think your dress will be the most beautiful thing. More beautiful than anyone, boy or girl—lovelier still than the cutlery, or a shoe.”

She rewarded my cheek with a real smile and a smack to the arm. “Insubordinate!”

She wore her blackcurrant atrocity and tried to make herself the palest, most plain thing in the room.

She could have worn sackcloth and still been a thing of awe.

Determined to prioritize my romantic prospects, she fended off all the hopeful boys who came near by begging faintness and sending them in search of a small cake before she could possibly dance. The spotted dog she had concealed underneath the tablecloth was going to become quite fat off of those cakes.

Gannon did not allow me the same privilege.

As if by magic, she reached out and plucked a stout lad from the throng. Before he could blink she had sat him down between us.

“Hesper Blay,” she said in greeting. “I thought you were abroad in search of sea monsters.”

He had been smiling nervously, but at the mention of what was obviously a favorite topic, he brightened. “Oh, that. We were only halfway to Droy before Lispan broke us on the coast.” He indicated another young man from across the room, one who was either dancing or arguing with Yune, I couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was both. “He thought the rocks were the creature’s back,” Hesper Blay said to me, conspiratorial but without malice. “He was very drunk.”

I could see why Gannon had dragged him out. Thought he was almost as disastrously tall as his father, he had a narrower frame, and perched on the chair like a person who didn’t know what to do with their full height. He was young. Perhaps he was my age.

“I know my father sent me to try and get married, but I haven’t read any of the pertinent material,” he admitted. “I can dance, but I’m afraid all I know how to talk about is seawater.”

“Alto loves the sea,” said Gannon, sipping her wine. “She sits at the window at night and smells the sea and sighs because she is not upon it.”

“I’ll dance,” I said, to escape her.

Hesper Blay was oddly quiet as he led me from the table, looked troubled as he took my hand and my waist, and only when we had fallen into the circle of twirling skirts and coattails did realization come over his face.

“I remember you!” he said. “You’re the one who rode her horse off of the docks last summer.”

“Not intentionally.”

“That was one of the best things I ever saw,” he marveled. “Anyone I know would have bailed, even my brother’s friends, and they all race sprinters.”

“I didn’t have time to bail,” I said. “I didn’t know that she was going to jump.”

“I still think it was bold,” he said, refusing to let me dodge his praise. “I saw how you rode her off, all hard-eyed and perched high in the stirrups, going down with the ship. You know what you ought to do? You ought to dress yourself as a boy, borrow a sprinter, and beat them all at their silly game.”

I was flabberghasted. “Are you trying to give me a bad reputation?”

“No one would ever accuse you of indecency, they’d be too busy laughing. Oops. I stepped on your foot. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” I was amused, both by his clumsiness and his odd ideas.

“Hanail and his friends never stop bragging about their victories to the girls around town.” I could tell this was a sore spot for Hesper. “They think they’re being terribly impressive, but the girls just want to work their shop stalls and drive their ponies in peace. They ought to be beat by a girl. Don’t you think?”

I decided I could be friendly with Hesper Blay. “You have an odd way of courting,” I said.

“I told you, I haven’t read the materials.” He grinned. “Nor learned to dance. Did I hurt your foot?”

“It’s fine. Delilah trods on it all of the time.”

“Is that the pony who fancies herself a dolphin?”

“Fances herself a sea monster, more like.”

He sighed, and looked away distantly. “We’ll find that thing yet.” He stepped on my foot again without noticing.

Just then there was a commotion from across the room. Yune was at the center of it, and with her was Lispan, who seemed to have fallen into a cake. Perhaps he had been pushed.

“He’s probably drunk again,” said Hesper.

“Or she is,” said I. We had stopped, but the dance went on around us, the twirling partners not to be distracted from the music or from each other.

“Or both,” he said. “I’d better step in.”

“Good luck with your sea monster,” I called after him, as he left to correct or to rescue his friend. I welcomed the opportunity to return to the table, Gannon, and her amassing collection of pastries—but before I could escape the floor, someone caught my hand and turned me back into the dance.

I looked up with a glare, expecting to see one of the more ambitious Blays.

It was Khoeveld. He was better dressed than earlier, and someone had attempted to fix his hair, but he still smelled faintly of the barn, and managed the dancefloor just about as well as a stablehand. If he had seemed uncertain earlier, he looked so ill at ease in this context that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him slip out of those neat clothes like he’d been oiled, and sprint out of the room.

“Sorry to steal a dance,” he said. “I’m not here to court. I need to speak with you.”

“There’s no need,” I said, anticipating an apology for frightening me, and already galled by the idea. “I’m sorry for my rude departure earlier.”

He looked perplexed for a moment, decorum lost on him, then pressed on. “I’m afraid there is a need. Is there somewhere we can speak in private? Perhaps pretend to go kiss on the balcony?”

I gaped at him. I was so shocked that I stopped dancing altogether, shocked enough that I wasn’t even offended. He stopped too. He didn’t seem to notice the stares of the passing dancers, nor register my reaction, although I was very visibly considering slapping him. “It is important,” he persisted.

There was something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. His default apprehension was colored by a more insistent dread. The shadows under his eyes dwindled beneath the eyes themselves, which were absent of their sleepy caution. He kept hold of my hand, not hard as if to restrain me, but in a tenuous way, as if in fear that I might tear it away and go.

“We can stand on the balcony,” I said finally.

—

Outside, he went immediately to the balcony’s edge and gripped it, gazing out over the city all the way down to the docks. The sun was setting over the sea and making him an imposing profile. Silhouetted in pink and gold, I thought I saw his head turning to seek Harmonium’s stable. I remembered what boarded there, and my spine prickled. When he found what he was looking for, he turned back to me as if comforted.

“Alto, do you dream of the valley?”

The oddity of the question had me taken aback as much as its suddenness. In my silence, he searched my face, and then tried a different approach.

“Do you dream of what lies behind those mountains?” He pointed past me, in their direction, though they were too far to be seen from the city. He pointed as if they could be seen clear as day through the house and the very curvature of the earth itself.

I didn’t want to think about how viscerally I knew their presence, how I did feel as though I could see them through the earth and sky and the hundreds of tired miles of travel. I felt them always. Like a compass, I was always trained in one direction, though I knew not what for. I liked to think of it as home, for I had been born in the direction of those mountains, but I knew that lie for what it was. I had been pointing towards the mountains since I had been born.

“Why does it matter what I dream?” I said finally.

“You read your Sundial, I’m sure of it. An educated girl in this caliber of household, you probably read a verse every day before breakfast, and another before bed. Am I wrong?”

“When I remember to,” I said, feeling scolded. “Of course.”

“Does your copy include the fifth book?”

Was this a trick?

“They’re not allowed in private hands,” I said slowly. “You have to go to the convent, or the obelisk ark to have it read.”

“And do you? Do you go to the autumnal reading to hear the entire recitation?”

I did not. In the southern cities, on the glowcoal of the coast and the fruitfulness of the sea, they opened the Sundial only for warm weather readings.

But in the north, in sight of the mountains, my mother had held a copy.

I remembered it hidden in a box next to her spices, unobtrusive in its pepper box disguise, shielded by a curtain of braided garlic. I had glanced towards it every breakfast and every supper. I looked, hoping for and dreading the day when autumn gold began to creep down the mountainside, when the first leaves fell on our narrow dirt road, and the rows of corn fell to harvest. When the hillsides became barren of their bright heather, and the lorheads came in with thickening fur, my mother would part the curtain of herbs and pull down the book.

Then, she would recite the autumnal revelations.

“I know the verses,” I said.

“If you know them, you know what lives in that valley,” he said. “Tell me, have you dreamt of it? Have you seen it?”

The sun was finishing setting over the sea. The sky was as purple as heather, as dark as the shadows under his eyes, which grew only deeper in the fading light. With eyes like those, he had no right to be awake and on his feet, let alone so powerfully earnest. It was as if he were finally waking up just as the sun was fading away. In this light… I realized. The beast could ride now.

“I don’t think my dreams are any of your business,” I said, aware that I was being cold, and that I was cold out of fright, and that I was angry because I was afraid. I owed nothing to this strange man—not my truth, not my company. I turned away.

Once again, he stopped me leaving before I could hardly think of it. He put out both hands in supplication and recited.  
“And the boghtmaws crawled over the mountains and out of the valley, hungry for blood and human touch, following the smell of a dream."

“The boghtmaws.” My lips numb around the horror of their true name. He was mad to say it.

“Have you dreamt her like before? Have you seen her kin?”

“There is a reason those verses are kept tucked away,” I snapped. “They lead to dangerous dreams, just like the ones you speak of.”

“There is a reason they are read!” he cried, becoming desperate. They must have heard him inside, for I heard a sudden lull in the noise of the party. “It is a warning,” he emphasized. “Tonight, tomorrow—in the north, the mountain snow is beginning to melt. It is freeing the paths that we do not know. The old walls can contain only things which are not clever, things which are not hungry, and the boghtmaws are both. They will be climbing out of the valley, and if you have dreamt them, they will come following the smell of your dream. Even the cradle of the sea and all of its stinking salt will not hide you.” There was frustration touching anger in his voice. “We must have warning before they breach the walls. If they are not captured in the spring, it will be a summer of blood.”

“Alto?”

Gannon stood in the doorway. Behind her were Yune and Faran, and a few more curious and gossipy faces, wondering how I had roused an argument from the placid night rider.

Gannon’s eyes skewered Khoeveld. He looked at his hands, where his fingers had curled as if to seize and rattle me loose from my silence. He dropped them. He looked as shaken as I felt.

“Alto, have you made our guest unwelcome?” Her words were for me, but the sleet in her voice was for Khoeveld, and her eyes never left him.

“Excuse me,” said Khoeveld, his voice very quiet. “I am the one who acted poorly. My apologies to the household, yourself, and the lady Alto. Too much to drink, perhaps.” He smiled in a painful, wretched way.

“I would speak to you alone,” said Gannon.

“Of course,” said Khoeveld, voice muted.

Faran took my arm as Gannon advanced on him. I heard only a whisper of their conversation before I was pulled away, and then I was comforted, and made much of, but nothing meant anything to me but the final ring of his words—Khoeveld speaking, his voice tired once more, warning Gannon: “Were I you, I would be careful not to fall too much in love with her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> author's notes:
> 
> ngl I really want to write something about hesper blay and his sea monsters
> 
> I also really want to eat whatever 'mandarin dragon' is


	5. hellbent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I've heard there was a secret chord_  
>  that David played, and it pleased the Lord,  
> but you don't really care for music, do you? 

I got very drunk.

Faran stole a jug of blackberry wine from the table, deep and floating with candied hibiscus petals. We retreated to her room (where she declared that, after witnessing such spectacular failures of courtship, it was the nunnery for her) and Yune joined us soon after, red-eyed and bearing a plate of bland wafers and an entire lemon cake. We dipped the wafers in lemon icing and discarded our gowns to lie about in our plain shifts and bare feet. A discrete serving girl rescued the gowns and hung them up. We gave her a handful of wafers for her troubles.

Yune was still morose over Lespin. “My mother taught me a drinking game, once,” she said. “She said, ‘every time you are disappointed by a man, take a single drink for comfort’. Then she would pick up the bottle and drink the whole thing, straight down.”

Faran put her hand on Yune’s to prevent her attempting the same. “She sounds like an impressive woman.” Faran, the least drunk and the only one who hadn’t gotten into an argument with a man, made it her job to play mother hen to us. She did what she could to distract Yune from her melancholy. “Do you look like her?”

“I’m the only one who got her hair,” said Yune, running her fingers dreamily through her chestnut locks. “Four sisters—all black haired. But for me… a crown of fire.”

Faran raised her eyebrows. She checked the jug to see how much Yune had drunk already.

I took the jug. She didn’t take it back, though I saw her consider doing so. I drank deep. The color of the wine, in the shadowed bottom of the jug, reminded me at once of Gannon’s dark dress and the black intensity of Khoeveld’s eyes.

“I’m sure Gannon will have the man run out of the city before morning,” said Faran, as if that were supposed to put me at ease. “Even a night rider can’t behave so with no consequences.”

“What did he say?” asked Yune, for the fifth time.

“Indecent things,” I said shortly, and began to drain the jug.

Eventually I made myself a drunk and senseless mess, and when Gannon reappeared she had me carried to bed like a child. She had me placed me into bed and had the gold unwound from my hair, but she personally drew the sheets up to my chin, and then she banished the servants with a wave. They pinched out the candles as they went, leaving smoke in their wake, lingering in the air. It was dark. Only the candle in Gannon’s hand was lit, and she placed it on my bedside table. She knelt beside my bed and rested her forehead on the coverlet.

The candlelight flickered in her yellow hair. Her pale fingers were clasped over her head, in a vague position of prayer, or gesture of exhaustion.

Behind her was a wall hanging of a hunted hell pig. It was weeping blood and lances, just as the candle was slowly weeping wax.

“You don’t have to kneel on the floor,” I mumbled.

She lifted her head. The candlelight bouncing off of the maimed boar turned her gray eyes to glimmering red ones.

“You always make yourself a trouble,” she said. She was not accusing me, she was not angry, she was merely speaking the truth. “You won’t ride the slow ponies and you only befriend the big dogs. You’ve torn more dresses than all the other girls put together. I bring together all the marriageable lads from the highest caliber of families, and you cause chaos with a stranger on the balcony.” She picked up my hand and held it in hers. “You’ll never marry, will you?” She was at once sad, wistful, and hopeful.

Even drunk, I was fluent in non-answers.

“Will you?”

She ran her knuckles gently over the back of my hand. Both of us observing how the candlelight flickered over our different, touching skin.

“No,” she said. “Not while you are here.” She linked our fingers just as she had earlier. “But you won’t always be here, will you?”

This, too, was the truth, and not a question.

I had never felt such a conflict of warmth and sickness in my life. The wine itself wasn’t making me nearly as ill as the blur it made of my brain, blending visions of the sea with the northerly ocean of bluestem, confusing harvest-ready yellow wheat with Gannon’s hair braided into its crown, and beating the silhouette of Khoeveld’s beast in my temples like blood from my hot heart.

Time was standing unseen at the foot of the bed. I knew Time and its ways from my mother. Time carried both crop and carrot, she had told me. It tempted you first, with visions of a golden future, but even if you balked in the face of coming pain, you were driven onward just the same.

I missed my mother.

I didn’t want to miss Gannon.

“You don’t have to kneel,” I said again. “You can lie on the bed.”

She blew out the candle, and it was dark.

I saw only the moon rising outside the window. The moon was full.

I heard a rustle of sheets meeting skirts, and then I felt the cover lift, and weight settle onto the bed next to me. I heard a soft clink, and then another, and another. She was taking out her hairpins and setting them on the bedside table.

I waited for her to turn, to wrap her arms around me, to press her lips to my neck.

She did not.

Clink. Clink.

Silence.

I looked over. She was sitting up in the bed, very still, silhouetted in moonlight. It took her a long time to speak. When she did, her voice was very quiet and her memories were very far away.

“When I was a child, I had a nursemaid named Lyella. She was about the age you are now. I liked her better than the other servants, because she snuck me into the kitchens to watch the cooks browning butter and pounding jerky in the wintertime. Lyella had odd dreams, and she told no one about them but me. They were dreams of the valley. I was fascinated, for at that age, I’d seen only bones, and heard no stories, as the Fifth Book was forbidden in my home. She told me every beast she had seen in her dreams—the great scimitar cats, the clovis wolves, the tusked mammuts and the hell pigs… and she told me about the beast that hunted them.

“She told no one else. By the time the wytchdogs sniffed her out, the beast had already come out of the mountains in search of her, and had bled dry acres of cattle and five families. Her own family was executed and hung from the obelisk for a month. They hung there until the rot made them slip their ropes. She was taken away. I don’t know where.

“I never forgot it. When I was older I wanted to understand what had happened. I went to the convent to study the Fifth Book in every translation. I read them all: Aidanan Blay, Corl Hallus, Sarga Meers. I wanted to understand every word.

“That’s where I saw you for the first time.”

I stared at her silhouette.

I barely remembered my years in the convent. I had entered it half-feral from tending cattle, covered in briar scratches and reluctant to be tamed. It had taken them years to mold Alto out of Husk—many dull, dull years of rote memorization and sitting in silent rows with the contemplatives. My memories were vague. I saw a blur of black frocks punctuated only by birthdays of modest pear cake and a glass of milk.

I had no memory of seeing Gannon there.

“You were practicing in the courtyard,” she continued. “I watched from behind the columns so I didn’t disturb you. The way you played, it sounded as if you hated your instrument as much as you loved it. I had never heard a violin scream so loudly. You were ruthless.”

I heard her smiling in the dark.

“Even after so many years of contemplatives schooling you, correcting your posture and training you to play like a lady, you emerged from the convent just as hellbent. When I came to browse the orchestra years later, to furnish my quartet, I heard your violin, and I knew instantly who played it, for it cried out in absolute submission. In a sea of sweet voices, it was the only one begging for mercy. You gave it none.”

Gannon was telling me the truth for the first time. Her voice was barely hers; there was no tease to it, no gentle mockery. She was admiring me, loving me.

“Hellbent…” she whispered it. “Not everybody sees it, but Khoeveld did. Perhaps that’s why he’s so sure the nightmare will come to you. Perhaps it takes a merciless spirit to meet a boghtmaw on equal footing. They show no mercy, Alto. My nurse told me so. They don’t just eat blood, they eat hearts.

“There are reasons that our cities hug the sea, and reasons that we rise with the sun. We don’t have to read it in our Sundial. We feel it in our heart, where God left the memory of the cold and the dark in us, so that we would be protected by our fear, so that we would not dream of those dark and bitter things. So we would stay—in our homes, in the sunlight, in each other’s arms.”

Her voice broke.

“Don’t dream, Alto.”

But I did dream.

—

I was in the north again, I could tell from the bite of cold in the air. This half of the world was still trying to escape the winter.

I remembered mornings like these. I remembered being Husk, being sent out to fetch water and shivering in my thin clothes, as I watched mist settling in the bottom of the hills of bluestem.

But this was no frigid prairie. It was a forest.

The trees around me were streaked with lichens and they towered overhead like the ancient columns of some ageless temple. Vines hung thick from their lowest branches, and I couldn’t see their tops. It was night, and if it had not been for a gap of moonlight, the choking trees would have blotted out the stars. As it was, I stood on a carpet of moss beside a perfectly round pool, ringed by the black trees, and above me was the full moon.

I didn’t need the moon to tell me that this was not a dream at all.

I looked into the water and was unsurprised to see not Alto, but Husk. Her hair was curling about her face like a black halo. Her eyes were sharp and suspicious, her nose freckled, and her mouth screwed up into a scowl. She touched her cheeks.

She was not afraid, even when something horrible arrived on the other side of the water.

It parted that black enmity of the trees opposite me. It was the narrow and brilliantly white nose of a skull thrusting out of the trees, appearing as if held aloft by invisible hands. The skull turned left, turned right, perhaps manipulated on marionette strings, and then it faced the water again, and the black pits of its eyes blinked.

It was no skull.

The ‘puppeteer’ stepped out of the trees, and it was an animal. The animal’s head hung not from strings but from a long and slender neck, which was topped with two long and slender ears. The ears were thin and stout like elm leaves. The creature’s whole body was slender as those ears. It seemed almost too narrow, too fragile and fawnlike to function—but the fragility was an illusion. I could see so from across the water. Its legs were slim only because its body was immense. Its emaciated, tucked belly only looked so because of the immensity of its heart girth, a chest that could have eclipsed me twice. The muscles of its shoulders betrayed great speed even as it moved delicately, softly. Its hooves didn’t so much as whisper on the mossy terrace.

It was a horse, and yet not a horse. It was as if one of our placid lorheads had been mated to a great serpent. It was the kind of guise God might have put on if he wanted to walk the world as a horse, for it was unearthly in its beauty. Every sharp edge and narrow part of it was perfect. A single wrong angle would have turned it to catastrophe, but its bones and its muscles were assembled without flaw. It was, in every strand of its mane, and every twitch of its muscle, sublime in a defiance of possibility. It was a witch and an angel conspiring in the skin of a horse.

Here, in this place, life lived lacking God, and it had created terrible perfection.

In the moonlight it was the color of wet copper. It painted in a single brushstroke without so much as a white foot—except for the head. Just below the ears, the face had been devoured by white.

I heard my mother’s words.

_“It’s late!” she had chided me. “Out courting nightmares again? You know what they say about moon-headed girls.”_

The moon-headed creature had lowered its head to court the surface of the water. Its ears turned inwards and its breath floated atop the water. About to drink, it suddenly stopped. Its ears turned forward, towards me, as if it too had heard the ghost of my mother’s misgivings.

It saw me.

The soft-stepping creature turned to stone. Its black eyes, like pearled obsidian pressed into a statue, bored into me. Veins bulged along its muzzle and ran grotesquely under the skin of its face from nostril to ear.

Without seeming to move, it coiled itself. Without seeming to move, it raised its head. The long rope of muscle that ran over the top of its neck furled, bulged, and rocked side to side, as it drew up its shoulders. Its head dropped off of that long rope of muscle and it audibly released its jaw. Its lip tightened, and then peeled back. The insane catalog of its teeth shone pure in the moonlight. The four canines, each as long as my forearm, dripped with hungry slaver, and the angel that was hiding inside inside raised its mask, and Hell, insane Hell looked at me from across the water.

Hell was named ‘boghtmaw’, and perhaps that was the moment it ate my heart, just as Gannon had said it would.

Hell was named ‘boghtmaw’, and my mother had known it, and every generation of mothers before her had known it, long after the language that named them had died, and they had known it long after the insurmountable walls had caged Hell in the valley, long after the beasts lived only behind those walls, and in the black works of the night riders, and in the centurial nightmare.

And this century it had come for me.

And it must have eaten my heart, for my chest was empty, and my stomach was full of awe and adoration.

I stepped out into that light and out of my fear, wet to my ankles, and I whistled Khoeveld’s gentle harmonic.

The boghtmaw threw its head in the air as if violently struck.

The jaws snapped shut and it blew out of its nostrils like a bull, but its eyes were wide with startle and not with rage. As if it weren’t three times my height and an abomination, it balked like a frightened child to the edge of the dark trees. There it stopped and it curled around. Its hind legs were underneath its body as if to spring, but it had contorted its neck to stare back at me. Now, the great snake of its throat seemed more like a swan’s, thin and elegantly arched.

Only with deep suspicion did it inch back to the water. With every step, it stopped and it flared its nostrils again. It pawed the ground until the moss was rent underfoot. I could smell the strength of hot iron coming off its nervous skin.

It finally reached the edge of the water and stared at me. Our eyes met, and in those black and shining pearls, I found inhuman intelligence looking back.

Recognition.

It struck the surface of the water, pawing with anxiety and alien fascination, and it snapped its jaw like a restless alligator before finally succumbing, striding into the water, coming in to me.

Its chest was three times as wide as my whole body, its demonic head easily larger than my torso, and I couldn’t have reached above that neckline if I had tried. Its head and neck blocked out the moon wholly overhead.

But the boghtmaw did me the courtesy of lowering his head to drop his muzzle into my cupped hands.

He exhaled, and I could smell the blood on his breath. As I ran a hand up his jaw, marveling at the size and weight of his head and how easily he held it, I could feel the bumps of his ghastly teeth under the skin.

He looked me over as I did him, rapidly inhaling my dream-smell of curly-haired cattle and fresh-cut hay. He had never met anything quite like me: a creature whose blood he couldn’t smell.

“That’s because this is a dream,” I told him, running my fingers through his wild forelock.

He dismissed that with a blow of his nostrils. The hot air flooded my face. He had dreams himself, but his only held thrilling pursuits, and the satisfaction of bone cracking in his jaws. This was no dream to him. It was a waking hunger, if an alien one, a hunger for my fingers cupping his evil lips and for possession of me and my curly hair. He was fascinated, bewitched. He wanted to devour the novelty of me, of my bare and human skin.

“I’ll wake up,” I warned him. “And I’ll be gone.”

He objected to that with a flare of his teeth and a pin of his ears. He would come to me, he decided, with youthful arrogance. He would sate his hunger in the world of flesh.

“Don’t be childish,” I said. He was, for all his enormity and viciousness, only a colt.

And I was only a girl, he noted mulishly. Who was I to compel him? How would I impose my will upon him? He was so far away, and I was too in love with him.

Just as Khoeveld had warned, I realized, the cradle of the sea and all its salt would not hide me. Not with this witch child hellbent on possessing my breath, my hair, my cut-hay memories and my human touch. Hungry for it.

Hellbent.

I reached out and touched the hot, twitching skin of his chest, and I could feel the enormous heart pounding in elation.

And then I awoke.

I was alone in the warmth of the morning sun and I could smell the sea. I could smell the smoky lilac and vanilla that was the absence of Gannon. The bed was empty, but her hairpins were still piled on the table beside it. I ran a hand over the pillow, finding a single yellow hair and looking at it. It caught the sun, and in the enormity of the morning light, almost disappeared. I cupped it in my hands, but instead of remembering the softness of Gannon’s hands, all I could feel were the lips of the beast and the teeth underneath them, and the warmth of the bed and the sun didn’t begin to touch the spring chill of the valley, which had mortared itself into the vacancy of my heart.

I looked up to see Gannon standing in the doorway, holding a tray of breakfast—oatmeal with cut peaches. Her hair was loose around her shoulders.

She stared at me from across the room and read the revelations of the night on my face.

She turned to stone, and love fossilized on her lips, and her eyes were dead slate gray as she set the tray down.

“I’ll summon Khoeveld,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> author's notes:
> 
> the verse from hallelujah obviously doesn't belong to this universe, but it was a song I listened to a lot when I wrote these early parts. it's another song in the soundtrack, for those who want to listen as they read along


	6. river

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _It was an error of God to put Love into Man, for Man had neither the wisdom nor the patience to understand the Love's horror... but God saw how swift beat the heart of Man, and how tightly he clung to the objects of his Love, and how Love made him plant sweet flowers and play sweet music, and God let Love run wild in the world, and even the dark and forbidden places were not free of it._
> 
> -the Second Book of the Sundial as translated by Aidanan Blay

The caravan hobbled over the rough dirt road. All I could see through the front of it were the spotted rumps of the two driven lorheads, the occasional glimpse of a tree, and the back of Khoeveld’s head. He was driving. If I had cared to wonder, I might have wondered if he had been a caravaner before he rode monsters… but my curiosity had withered.

I sat in plainsclothes with only a bag of small and meaningless belongings. My feet were in boots and my hair in a single braid, for the days of adornment were falling farther behind me with every bob of those spotted rumps.

Khoeveld didn’t speak to me, and hadn’t since we left the city.

I took silent inventory of everything I had left behind.

I had left Delilah. A city horse didn’t deserve to endure the road, not the arduous travel nor what lay at the end of it. She belonged in her cozy stall half buried in straw, and to be curried daily and grazed on manicured pastures.

I had left my blue dress. I had no dresses now, because they were frivolous for the road and impractical for the coming trials, easily torn. I remembered how Hesper Blay had joked that I should dress as a boy, and it was almost funny. What a twist, to be dressed so just the day after Gannon had toiled so hard to turn me into a woman.

I had left my violin. It would surely have cracked in the transition to colder weather, and that aside, I had no use for the instrument. I no longer wanted to play.

I had left Gannon.

“We’ll pass through Culcester before nightfall.” Khoeveld spoke finally. “We can spend the night there, if you prefer a bed and a wall around you, or we can keep driving and reach the convent by morning.”

I didn’t say anything. In no hurry, he glanced up at the sky. “Looks like rain,” he remarked.

“Where’s the beast?” I asked finally. It was the first real question I’d asked since he’d been called practically to my bedside. He had wanted to hear about the dream in every detail. The light in his eyes had been one of excitement, almost celebration, and he had actually reached out to clasp my hands before I tore them away. That checked him, and he had retreated to protocol. It was the north for us, he had said. North—to the mountains, and to the very base of the valley wall. I gave assent in my silence, and he was quiet as I packed, giving only tentative advice about what was and wasn’t practical.

He had left me alone to say good-bye, but I couldn't think of that.

Afterwards, I had descended the steps of the estate house feeling numb in my boots and strange in my rough clothes, and I had ascended the cart in silence.

Now it was his turn to be silent. He stopped the horses.

“Let me show you something.”

—

Khoeveld crouched near the ground on the road, which was empty as far as I could see in either direction. On either side of us was scant wood. It smelled of untamed country, for we were too far south for farmland, and too far north for vineyards. He rolled up his sleeves and held a hand palm down over the earth.

“Look,” he said. “You see the shadow?”

The shadow of his hand was slightly fuzzy from the cloud cover, but, “Yes, I see it," I said.

“Everyone knows that our horses can’t tolerate the sunlight. That’s why we ride at night. What few people know is that if the sun is hidden enough by cloud, we can ride during the day.” He waved his hand over the earth, moving the shadow. “If you put your hand down like this, and there’s no shadow… we can ride.” He looked up at me. “She is behind us, following the storm.”

I looked behind us. A great thunderhead was billowing in the distance.

“How does she know how to find you?”

“Smell.”

I thought of Yune’s story of their eyes being replaced by giant nostrils, and I shivered.

“She’ll join us when the light allows,” he said. He straightened up. “Shall we make for Culcester?” There was a test in his asking of it.

“No,” I said. “Ride through the night.”

—

Night reached us before the storm did. The thunderhead stalked us from behind, crackling and dropping lightning miles in the distance. Ahead, the sky faded into deepening shades of purple, until the stars began to wink where they could.

I had joined Khoeveld in the front seat. I was looking out for the torchspecks of the convent, though I knew it would be hours still before we could see them. Mostly I wanted to sit with him. I was becoming determined to find out what kind of man he was, to see what lay beyond the peculiarities. I had always found with men that silence was revealing—the way they shifted a leg toward you, or away, or whether they politely made room, or covertly attempted to touch you. There was hopefulness and guile in their whole bodies. That being said, the longer I sat next to Khoeveld, the more I began to suspect that the man didn’t have enough guile to fill a pinky.

“Fireflies,” he said when he saw them, pointing, sounding both surprised and pleased. “You get them early this far south, I suppose?”

“Are you from the north?” I asked.

He looked at me, surprised and pleased again, as though he had thought I would never speak to him again if not out of necessity. “East of the mountains,” he said. “Just a stone’s throw from the great wall between Hag’s Head and Necessity peak.”

“I’ve never seen the wall. Any of them.”

“They’re beyond words,” he said, though he went on to use his words with great gusto. “They climb almost to the very peaks of the mountains themselves. Each stone is the size of a house. Age has compressed them, I think. You couldn’t slip even a sheet of paper between the cracks. They can’t even be climbed. They’re too smooth, polished to a flat shine by thousands of years of the unflinching elements.”

“If the walls are so magnificent, how do the boghtmaws get out?”

“They’re clever, and soft-footed,” said Khoeveld, nodding his head over his right shoulder in proof. “She’s been pacing our carriage for about an hour now.”

My breath stuttered. I whipped my head around to where he had nodded, but Isaw nothing in the dark woods. I listened for hooffalls in the leaf litter. I even searched the air for that metallic smell that had been so potent in the dark of Harmonium’s stable.

Khoeveld watched me try to suss her out with a smile. “She knows better than to spook the horses.”

“How do you know she’s out there?” My spine prickled. Not seeing the creature was more unbearable than seeing her.  
He shifted in his seat and adjusted the reins very comfortably, as if this was the man in his element: in the pitch night, driving two horses, with a monster keeping pace somewhere in the dark. “You’ve had the dream,” he said. “You're beginning to understand what it's like. I feel her like a hook in my chest—like how a compass feels when it’s pointing true. The same way you feel.”

He fell silent, but when I looked at him, he was looking back expectantly. I realized he was asking, without asking, about that fae child of my dream.

“Is he real?” I answered his question with my own.

“He’s real,” confirmed Khoeveld, with a small smile, looking back to the road. “And you’re going to meet him.” He said it as if we were going to see the new child of some relative, with a little thrill of excitement, and not as if he were delivering me to the teeth and hungry eyes of a beast of the valley.

The horses suddenly balked. The caravan rocked to a halt. The horses flared their nostrils, threw their heads, and began to twist against the harness. Khoeveld checked them sharply.

“You have bad manners,” he reproved.

I realized he was not talking to the lorheads.

The boghtmaw stepped out of a darkness that was synonymous with her. The night was sleek and shining, and so was she. Her hide swallowed moonlight and reflected it back, turning her into a mirror and a shadow of the sky. She crossed the road in impossible silence. She was as soundless as a spider, despite her immense size, as if she did not exist in the same world as the dirt, or the grass.

She was broader than the colt from my dream—much broader, and more elephantine. I was struck with surprise that she had fit into Harmonium’s stable at all. Her chest was wide and muscular, her haunches bulging with the signs of speed, and her neck was as thick as the swaying branch of a redwood.

The boghtmaw greeted her rider with a throaty cackle.

The lordheads lost it completely. They plunged forward, and the caravan ratcheted forward with them. My knees slammed against the headboard. Khoeveld knotted the reins in his fist and hauled with no avail.

The boghtmaw appeared to teleport on top of them, so swift was she. She seized one by the neck in her great jaws like a dog, ready to shake her head and snap its neck.

But the monster did not shake the lorhead to death, nor even appeared to break the skin, only held the thing (terrified into gasping silence) into place. Her near eye flicked sideways to focus on Khoeveld. I could see the white rim of it glimmer in the moonlight. I could smell the hot stink of iron.

Khoeveld looked sideways at me, just as his horse looked at him. On his face was a half-hope that I would be awed and even enamored of her. I don’t know what my face said. My heart was thrumming in my chest in inseparable fear and elation.

“Her name is River,” he said. His tone invited me to celebrate the introduction. “The Black River.”

I could think only of the hidden fangs and picture them latching on, and imagine blood draining down the white neck of the lorhead. The poor beasts were trembling so hard they shook the harnesses to jingling. “Is she going to kill it?”

“Her manners aren’t that bad,” said Khoeveld with a laugh. “And she’s already fed. Here, hold the reins?” He handed them over to me before I could assent and slipped out of the box to go meet his beast.

I couldn’t feel the reins in my fingers. Even though I knew he was a night rider, that this was his monster, and he understood and even seemed to love her, I still wanted to cry for him to run.

The mare released her insignificant cousin. She curved her head around swanlike to rest her nose on Khoeveld’s shoulder, nestling her muzzle horrifically next to his throat. He patted her neck on either side, slapping it playfully like a drum, and he gave his soft and eerie whistle. She cracked her voice in response, lifted her nose, and bared her teeth right in his face. He rapped his knuckles affectionately on her grand canines.

“What is the whistle for?”

At my voice, River’s eyes lifted to fix on me. I could see so clearly how she could bowl him over, clamber up the box, and size me and drag me down with her fangs. I would be less than a doll in those teeth.

Khoeveld left a finger tickling between her nostrils as he looked over his shoulder at me. “Their mouths aren’t built to speak our languages, nor ours theirs. The whistle is just a way for us to know each other.” He looked back up at her and cupped her massive jowls in his hands. He watched her staring at me with those black eyes, and smiled.

“She remembers you,” he said. “She can smell it on you too, you know—the dream. They all can.”

“How can a dream have a smell?”

He contemplated that for a moment. “It’s about what the dream is about,” he said finally. “It’s home. They never go back into the valley, once they’ve come out of it. There's no way. But, they remember it. It's where they were born, suckled, where they learned to run. She remembers the chill of the snowmelt, the scent of those templar forests, and the blood of scimitar cats. You remember how your childhood smelled, don’t you? You remember whatever soup your mother made when you were sick?”

I remembered smell of hay, the curling fur of the cattle, the pots of boiling stew and the steaming potatoes. I remembered the smells of rain and pine oozing down from the mountains to pool in my sleep.

River's nostrils flared.

She left the lorhead, whose bit Khoeveld seized before it could flee. My fear didn’t have time to touch my heart before the boghtmaw was upon me, reaching her head over the box to pin me down with her eyes. I saw my own reflection in them. I wondered how many living things had seen their own reflection so clearly, right before the life was drained out of their throats and their hearts pulled from their chests.

She had a small white star on her forehead.

Though ghastly, though more enormous than the hungry red child of my dreams, though hideously silent and stinking of an ancient abattoir, something about that white star disarmed me. I thought of the white snip on Delilah’s delicate nose. Though it would have taken her a heartbeat of noneffort to encompass my head and chest in her jaws, something about her eyes and her breath confused my heart, and it said 'horse' instead of 'monster', and I reached out, and I touched River’s white star.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: I know a horse named River, though he's a gelding. He looks very similar. He's tall and black and he has just a little white on his face. I don't remember if I knew him before or after I wrote about the fictional Black River here. I think I knew him after, because I remember seeing his nameplate and being really surprised by the coincidence, but it's probably more likely that I saw the horse and the name, and my subconscious hung onto it without realizing. I've ridden him a few times and he's a very sweet boy. Everyone says he's stupid but I like him a lot.


	7. the wytchdog

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _When it is proper, make a glad sound unto God. When sorrows come, sing tears so that God may hear and ease them. Raise your voices and your instruments and speak the truth. You will find comfort._  
>  -the Fourth Book of the Sundial as translated by Aidanan Blay

The convent had been converted from a barbarian roost hundreds of years ago, and despite the years, some of the barbarians’ touch lingered on the land. Even in the dark I could see the great hills of buried tombs crowned in their cypress trees. The road was an unpredictable serpentine as it was forced to navigate around the myriad hillocks. As the road became its most convoluted, where the mounds were at their highest, torches cropped up. Without them, in this gravesite of a wood, it was too easy to go astray.

My years at the convent had been ripe with stories of these hills. The dormitories had been full of forbidden tales of men and women lost in the cypress, possessed by barbarian spirits and cursed to wander forever in search of their lost tombs. It was easy to tell where the stories came from; the wind was often distorted by the strange hills, and sometimes turned to an odd cry.

A mournful cry rose through the night, but it was not a spirit.

Khoeveld and I heard the garbling of the wytchdog growing louder until we turned the corner to find the first guard standing under torchlight. The guardswoman was cloaked in pure white, wearing the roughspun headscarf of a Contemplative but no veil, and bearing both pike and crossbow. The wytchdog was gibbering at the end of its leash. An ugly, hairless thing, its eyes pointing in two different directions, it scrabbled in the dirt and strained against its jingling collar. The collars were to help find wytchdogs lost in the woods. Without their many ringing bells, the stupid dogs would get as aimlessly lost as the travelers from our stories—except that instead of being spirited away, they would be eaten by cairn wolves or frost cats. The wytchdogs were as stupid as their noses were powerful.

The torchwoman popped the dog’s collar to silence it as Khoeveld halted us alongside her. With River vanished somewhere in the darkness, we looked as innocent as any travelers. I had donned my summer cloak against the hint of chill that still lived in these forests. He was dressed much the same, and his expert hold of the reins made him look like any caravanner.

“My sister and I are traveling north, carrying herbs and spices,” he said. He was looking not at her, but at the drooling wytchdog, and with pity. Did the love of a boghtmaw give him sympathy for all hideous things? I wondered. “We come to consult the Sundial and receive blessed passage on our journey.”

“I have to check the caravan,” she said.

The wytchdog snuffled its way through the boxes and barrels with a furiously wagging tail, naked of hair. Our goods were indeed innocent. I had checked them myself earlier, out of boredom, disappointed to find only teas and tins of herbs and spices. What a mundane reason for a night rider to travel so far south. It had never occurred to me that a night rider would have duties beyond guarding borders and slaying brigands.

The dog came sniffing up to my feet. It gazed up at me with milky eyes, and I recoiled. Khoeveld reached down to greet it with wiggling fingers in front of its nose. “Hello,” he said, fanning his scent towards it. The dog thrust is wet and shivering nose against Khoeveld’s palm.

Even the handler looked at him oddly. “You have a strange smell about you,” she said. “And you know it; you aren’t scared to lose a finger.”

Khoeveld smiled a disarming smile I didn’t know he had, looking much younger when he did, though the flickering torchlight only made more unnerving the deep shadows beneath his eyes.

“A woman passed through here two nights ago,” said the guard. “Looking for a man caravaning goods to the north. She was not afraid of the dog, either.”

“Was she driving a caravan as well?” asked Khoeveld, too innocently.

The look the guard gave him was black. “We don’t allow those bloodhungry things within our walls. She did not have such a clever disguise, and she was bitter over her reception, and left as swiftly as she had come. Very swiftly.” She spoke flatly as she eyed the darkness of the cypress mounds. “Your beast will have to shelter out upon this unholy ground.”

Khoeveld said nothing, but remembering my days at the convent, my temper flared. How much had changed in the years since I had donned my gowns and gone? Already prickled by days of pemmican and rough bread, I leaned forward.

“Have they shut the fifth book even here, Sister? Do the walls not remember the siege of the corrupted men, not fifty years past, when the night riders peeled them off the walls and scattered their spoiled corpses? Who issued the edict to deny your protectors their shelter?”

Khoeveld stared at me, but the guard was unimpressed.

“I’m not the one you need to convince,” she said. “Speak to Scatterhorse at the gate—she’ll determine whether or not there’s room at the inn for a boghtmaw.”

She leaned over and spat in the dirt of the road.

—

The years and the dark of the night had robbed me of my familiarity with this road, such that when we turned the final curve to reveal the convent, it took me by surprise.

Ahead, a great bluff loomed out of the trees, and above it, perched on the edge of the sheer drop, stood with the convent with a candle glittering in every window. They were a thousand shining yellow eyes. The single tower of the convent was lit as well, but with a greater flame, a great beacon that acted as lighthouse over where these upper-southern forests dissolved into plains. I had once carried fire and oil here. I once had run candle duty as a fresh girl in an ugly frock, lit candle after candle to teach me patience. I remembered how long it took me, for in every window I had paused to stare out over the great cliff. I had tried and failed to find the bottom with my eyes.

The bluff had once been a bison kill. Our unspeaking ancestors had driven horde after horde of bison over its edge to be crushed and destroyed on the rocks below, leaving their signature not in petroglyphs, but in pulverized and compacted bone that ran deeper than a river. I remembered the chalky smell of walking that path. Many ancient ornaments of the convent had been carved from that recovered bone.

“I always treasure this view,” said Khoeveld without looking at me, though I looked at him. I wondered how many times he had traveled this journey, and if he had ever passed through the convent walls when I was receiving instruction within them. Had his path crossed mine somehow before, just as Gannon’s had?

The convent disappeared as we passed through thickening trees one more, and did not reappear until we emerged from them at its base. There I had to crane my neck to see it. The road upwards continued to our left, carved out of the blunt hillside. There was a barrier between sky and wall, grown out of the thorny hedge of the horse apple, but it was still a disconcerting climb.

Here at the base were more guards. They were a somber cluster of women in black hoods, torchlight sparking off their weapons. Behind them, an alcove had been hewn into the rock for shelter, just big enough for the group to cluster during a rain. On either side of the alcove were great dangling ropes with stones hung from them, part of a cleverly rigged system of pulled, built to lift goods up to the convent when they were too large or too fragile for the journey up the road.

Our little caravan ground to a halt. “Hail, sisters,” said Khoeveld gaily.

“It’s Khoveld again,” sighed one. “Have you come for blessed passage, or the food?”

“Can’t it be both?” This was the most freely I had ever seen Khoeveld smile, except with his black beast.

The guard’s eyes turned on me. “And your travel companion?”

One of the other guards exclaimed. “It’s Alto!” She pushed back her hood, and with a start, I recognized a once-familiar face.

“Harper?”

She laughed. A redhead like Yune, but swarthier, Harper looked the same as she always had, only a little older, and with a long and troubling scar down her chin. “Only on the holy days. Why are you here? You haven’t been dismissed from that high house, have you?”

I looked at Khoeveld for our travelers’ guise, realizing too late that my indecision would negate any tale he manufactured.

He only grinned. “She is here for the food, also.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you want a real visual of a wytchdog picture a greyhound combined with a naked mole rat


	8. Scatterhorse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _...translation of the Fifth Book overly couched in mysticism, when it ought to be read with dry eyes in the daylight. Fear of the ancestral mystique can be attributed to the millennia standing between us and the ones who originally committed the words of the recitations to memory--mystic fear is not inherent in the text._  
>  -commentary on Aidanan Blay's translation of the Sundial, Sarga Meers

Scatterhorse and her hound awaited us at the top of the bluff, at the great gate of the convent. The narrow landing before it made for easy defense. It would have taken very little effort to bar that gate, open the innumerable small windows, and pour arrows and burning oil down upon the assailants. I had never seen such a thing happen, but I had heard those stories, too.

Scatterhorse wore the only red robes of the convent, and in the dull light she stood as a slumped column of near-black. Her face was dark and withered beneath her cap. One eye was white with cataracts, like that of a wytchdog’s, and the same side of her face was slumped and slack from the holy ailment that had earned her those robes. The hound’s purpose was to support that withered half of her. It was a silent thing, with dropped ears and a tired, solemn face, gray around the muzzle.

Scatterhorse had been the hillmother when I was taken here as a child, and in all the years since, neither she nor the dog seemed to have changed.

That was the old magic of the contemplatives.

Her voice was deep and sure, sounding more like a man's than a woman's. That, too, was the old magic.

“Your sister was here only days past, looking for you, Khoeveld.”

“I was told she was refused shelter from the sunlight,” said Khoeveld. He was either more guarded or more reverent, speaking to her. “I recall being welcome when I was last here. What has so changed about your hospitality?”

“Kholken’s behavior was ungracious,” said Scatterhorse bluntly. “Something had disturbed her. I saw raw skin on her creature’s haunches as if they had been racing daylight. They were both of them unhinged, and the horse was hungry. Its eyes followed my every step. I sent them away.”

“What disturbed her?” asked Khoeveld. Now he was less guarded; there was concern on his face.

“She would not say.”

For a moment Khoeveld said nothing, only looked at the gate in his own personal contemplation. He seemed to have forgotten me, the hillmother, and the horses and the cart entirely. His already weary face was consumed with worry.

“Who is Kholken?” I asked.

He remembered me, and offered a very unconvincing smile. “A sister of ours. You will meet her.” He failed to hide his unease at the idea. Maybe I had been spoiled by my acquaintance with Khoeveld; perhaps this other rider, this Kholken, lived up to the blacker reputation of the nightmount. I thought of Scatterhorse's words ('They were both of them unhinged, and the horse was hungry.'') with a thrill of apprehension.

I heard Scatterhorse chuckle—a dark sound. “Is that our little black-haired Alto?” She smiled with the functional side of her face, and despite her blindness I felt her search my face. “Have you come to rejoin your sisters?”

“‘Rejoin’?” repeated Khoeveld. I hadn’t told him, I realized. In the short, tense time we had been a company, it had never occurred to me to tell him of my upbringing in the convent, not even as we approached it.

“A daughter of ours will never be denied bed, table, or hearth at her home," said Scatterhorse. "Nor her new brother. Your mount may shelter the day here, Khoeveld.”

“Many thanks for your generosity,” he said, with due reverence.

Without more than a soft _shhhhk_ of bolts sliding out of place, the doors gaped inwards. Beyond them was the courtyard. Its once-pebbled walkway, worn as smooth as the path of bone below the bluff, ran a ring around a cluster of columns at the very center. The columns were carved from the dryblood stone of the mountains, dragged from them an age ago. They were nestled in wildflowers—purple honeycomb head, black aster, thrumwort and golden samphire, all bedded down in bluestem—and betwixt them was the roughly-hewn statue of Elegia Broken by God. From here I could see only her outstretched arm, palm open to the sky.

Upon entry to the convent I, like so many others, had pricked my finger on hers and fed my blood to the flowers.

I wondered if ever Khoeveld, too, had paid his respects to the Lady Elegia.

A handful of frocked and covered girls emerged from the shadows to take the horses and the caravan. They didn't look at us. Standing aside, I so clearly remembered being one of those tasking girls, except I had always looked, out of either bravery or rudeness.

I was still staring after those girls and after the caravan, feeling somehow robbed of yet another home, when Khoeveld’s whistle filled the air and its usual ghostly slot down my spine.

Remembering Faran’s story ( _'I didn’t hear a sound. Its hooves might have never touched the ground.'_ ), I held still and did not look. I was waiting to hear hooves on the road. I was waiting to hear the heavy breathing of a creature that had come up that steep hill. I waited to hear blowing like a buffalo, the clatter of rock like one of those ancestral beasts, run off the cliff. But I heard nothing.

I turned around, and she was standing there: a starless patch of sky in the shape of a horse.

Khoeveld was standing on his tiptoes to tickle the whiskers on her chin, and he was whispering something to her. River’s ears were tipped forward to catch every word. I marveled at how like a child he looked in front of her, his own silhouette so small against the enormity of the night sky. From here I could see all of her for the first time, with less shock, and she struck me as strange in a new way. For a northern creature, she was poorly dressed. She had no thick fur or feathers on her heels. Remembering the heat of her white star against my palm, I wondered if all boghtmaws ran so hot, even in the valley. I could picture her plowing through barbaric winter snows and leaving a black trail melted behind her.

She bunched her neck so Khoeveld could speak directly into her ear. Was he actually speaking to her, I wondered, as he would to me or to Scatterhorse? I remembered what he had said about how they had no tongues for our language. He had never said that they did not understand it.

His hands fell from her cheeks as he stepped away. On some cue she turned and faced over the cliffside.

She opened her mouth and screamed, and I flinched, and despite myself I almost put my hands to my ears. It was a raw sound that started in her chest and scaled up to a single pure, tortured note. It sounded more like a woman being drug over hot coals than the whinny of a horse. It climbed higher into an alien arpeggio: Khoeveld’s whistle translated into A minor and fed to a mountain cat.

And then she fell silent and stood with ears pricked, gazing out over the blackness of the cypress mounds and glimmering river pockets.

Another voice answered.

The scream rose from somewhere in the distance, but not far away at all. It was not an echo of River’s tune, but a single dissonant shriek, like the warped bugle of a maimed elk.

River snorted. It was the most horselike sound I’d heard her make.

“Kholken is near still,” said Khoeveld.

“At least, her beast is,” said Scatterhorse. She was unperturbed, but her dog had begun to shake and drool and shake like a diseased thing. “And it remains unwelcome. I won’t have it disturbing our young girls.”

Would I have been so disturbed in my youngest days? I wondered. Yes, I had fled River in the dark stable of Harmonium Blay, but then, I had been Alto. Would feral Husk, fresh-caught from the cow lanes, have been so disturbed?

I thought not.

“Of course,” agreed Khoeveld.

“Will you have the old room?” asked Scatterhorse, now that that was settled.

“Are you asking me, or the little sister?” Khoeveld looked sideways at me, a little slyly. He hadn’t missed the quiet reveal of my origins. I suspected questions would follow later.

Scatterhorse lifted her working eyebrow. “Brothers and sisters of the nightmount, new or old, should board with their beasts,” she said mildly.

“The feed room then, with the cots?”

“The feed room,” she affirmed. “With the cots.”


	9. reinbread

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _That which in the valley lies, and  
>  meet with death and yet not die  
> can reign  
> where man dare not to try._  
> -a Book of Odes, Corl Hallus

I fell asleep doused in the smell of grain, tucked between two bins on a cot of lumpy straw. It might as well have been a feather bed after so many nights on the caravan floor.

As I bedded down I could see the hint of a lightening sky through a slit of a window.

Khoeveld had his own cot just across the tiny room, tiny enough that I could have reached out and kicked him. That, among all the strange circumstances of my changing life, was the strangest—girls in the convent were barely allowed to speak with a man, let alone sleep in the same room as one.

Khoeveld, qualmless, had seen to River’s bedding, then fallen facefirst onto the cot and into unconsciousness.

Well, that answered the question of whether the man ever slept.

I was beginning to wonder if I was fated to follow the same strange, nocturnal sleep schedule for the rest of my life.

And then, suddenly, I was dreaming.

—

I was sitting on a lip of the Dragonhead and I was looking out over the valley.

I could see nothing of it, not even the tops of trees, for a storm was rolling past me down the mountainside. Within the thick cloud cover I could taste rain and feel nearby lightning raising the hair on my neck.

I looked up and saw stone-gray clouds blooming upwards. The clouds cast an illusion, as if the mountain was growing all around me. I couldn’t see the top of them.

I looked down, and I reached out to hover my palm over the mossy rock.

There was no shadow.

I heard the soft skittering of sliding rock and turned around.

There, standing on a rock shelf twenty feet above me, was the red colt with his moon head and black eyes staring down. He was streaked in lather, his sides heaving and hide steaming. His mane clung to his wet neck.

He was climbing over the mountain, I realized, and out of the valley.

He pricked his ears to see me, and seemed to pull his shoulders up in pride. It had been an arduous journey, and he had made it so far. At first he had hunted at the base of the wall, searching for a gap or weak spot with no luck. That having failed him, he had finally realized his only option: to go over the mountaintop itself.

His lungs ached from the effort and the thinness of the air, so much that he could not even call to me.

“Turn around and go home!” I yelled at him.

He didn’t even humor the thought, my reservations lost on him. And — reservations aside — he _couldn’t_ go back.

Something was hunting him from below.

I felt the bass rumble in the earth. The something was speaking with the voice of thunder, and its voice was only amplified in the building storm and spreading in the rock and the dirt. The immense voice rippled over my skin, bounced off the mountain around me, and then cascaded back down the cliffside.

The red colt stood still and seemed not to breathe.

“What is it?” I barely mouthed the words, but the colt heard me, even when my words melted to nothing in the thick cloud. I could hardly see him through it now. All there was, were two black eyes boring through the haze.

_It’s the life of the mountain._

_It’s the voice of the dragon._

—

I jolted awake.

It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the lack of light. The feed room was dark, lit only by a small lamp, burning in the corner.

Khoeveld was already awake and looked as though he had been for a while. He sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, forehead pressed against them, and his hair was more mussed than ever. He looked up, and there was faint dread in his black eyes. I knew somehow that he knew my dream, and thought, _he has dreamed this dream, too._

“Khoeveld,” I blurted out. “What else lists in the valley?”

He smiled, a very wan smile.

“Breakfast?”

—

The vast dining hall of the convent was empty but for a few sisters breaking from their nightly chores and a meager kitchen staff who served us in polite silence.

I had forgotten the taste of convent food. It was a welcome change from Khoeveld’s travel rations. Here were oatcakes — still warm — and stuffed eggs, hand pies of savory winter mince, and sausage blended generously with fat, and of course, the thinly braided reinbread with a small bowl of salt.

I could have eaten nothing but that reinbread. I pinched off a corner and set it aside as a customary offering, though there were no birds here to carry it away to God, or young girls with baskets to gather the crumbs and take it to them. Once, I had been that girl. I had gone down the rows of tables, gathering bread prayers from each platter, and taken them out to one of the back courtyards to feed the birds. It had been my favorite chore. I liked the birds, and I had always suspected that delivering the bread personally meant my prayers had a better chance of reaching God.

I saw that Khoeveld, too, pinched off a corner of his bread and set it aside.

I wondered what he prayed for.

“Were you raised in the convent?” he asked. It was a rude question, for only bastards and abandoned infants were raised here. Perhaps he meant to be rude to distract me from my question about the dragon.

“I was sent here to be educated,” I said. It was a generous version of the truth. “I was trained in music.”

“The violin, wasn’t it?”

“The choir, at first, but I took better to strings.”

“The choir,” he said. “Hence, ‘Alto’.” He stirred his porridge and looked thoughtful.

I could sense the questions that would follow, found a flush of shame at the answers, and rerouted him. “Do all riders’ names sound like yours?” I asked. “Khoeveld, Kholken.”

He was spreading butter on an oat cake now, more butter than was needed. “Sometimes,” he said. His voice was too casual. I sensed we were both dodging questions. Though I was just as guilty, I was annoyed by his withholding.

“Is she really your sister?” I persisted, my food forgotten, sausage cooling on my plate. “By blood? Or by vows, like the sisters here?” Did the nightmount have vows, I wondered? Did they have their own refuge, high upon a bison kill? I was suddenly boiling with the questions I had not thought to ask before, the ones that had gone unasked in my grief and exhaustion, and which emerged now with resentment that I did not know the answers.

Khoeveld put down the butter knife, loudly enough that the sound echoed in the large chamber. The few convent sisters looked up from their side of the room.

“More than blood,” he said. There was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before — almost anger. He was as intense now as he had been on Gannon’s balcony, warning me of the dreams. He was warning me of something now. I knew not what.

Husk, grown bold in this familiar place, couldn’t tolerate it.

“My mother sold me when I was eleven.”

He looked at me in surprise as I challenged him with the honesty. I _dared_ him to scorn me.

“My father was dead before I knew him well. I had seven brothers and sisters. They all worked to keep bread on the table and wood for the stove in winter. They worked for our family, then for other families, and they sent money. Then they didn’t send it. And then they didn’t return.

“I’ve always thought that’s why she sold me — the convent pays so little for girls, and we were not so poor then. We had cattle still. But better to sell me than wait for me to leave, as had my brothers and sisters. I didn’t hate her for it, because I would have, just as soon as I could find a horse. I sat astride the cattle sometimes, and pretended they were horses. I pretended that I was leaving—running to the mountains, maybe, to join the loggers and their bousons beneath the Torchspine, or maybe to the coasts to never see a winter again.”

I stared at him, waiting for scorn. Waiting for pity. Waiting for him to realize that I was just crown braids on a cowherd, who wore polished nails to cover the dirt and the cracks they had known from my girlhood.

He smiled.

“My father sold me down the street to the knackers,” he said. “I think I was ten—just big enough for my fingers to hold the skinning knife. That was where I learned to drive—every day I would take the cart up and down the road and collect dead things. The cart stunk terribly, even when it was empty, and so did the scrawny pony that pulled it. I graduated to the butchers when I was older. I knew cattle, too, though I was cutting their throats, not following them over the hills.

“I spent half of my life covered in blood. I used to think that was why I was chosen for the dream, and for River. I thought she could smell the blood on me all the way in the valley. I could never escape the smell of blood in those days, no matter how often I bathed.

“After I left, I never touched meat again.”

I realized, looking at the table, that he had not. His plate was empty of sausage and of the pies.

Even Husk was disarmed by that, but it didn’t stop her words from spilling out of my mouth.

“Why _were_ you chosen?”

The _'and why was I?’_ went unspoken.

He thought about that, looking up at the high ceiling. “Kholken told me once that no one is chosen, not really. These things just happen incidentally. She said that God gathers blood magic in His palm, and blows it out into the world like a handful of plucked petals. It is His whim, not our deeds.”

He gave me a wry look. “Kholken was not educated in a convent.”

“Who _is_ Kholken?”

“I think I’ll leave Kholken up to Kholken to explain,” he said drily. “But there are other things I can explain to you. Finish your breakfast, and let’s retire to the courtyard—we can scatter reinbread, and I’ll tell you our history.”


	10. the moral of Lamoneric

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Love is hot, and fear is cold.  
>  You may be frost-bit or burnt on coals.  
> Death can come swift, or slow,  
> in flames or in the snow._  
> -a Book of Odes, Corl Hallus

The night was crisp, not cold. We were only a few weeks late to see frost on the clover. Instead, the leaves and the grass were flecked with dew. The air smelled clean and still hinted at rain, though the storm was nowhere to be seen. Either it had parted ways with us or dissipated altogether.

I sat on one of the many stone benches, remembering its lack of sympathy for my seatbones. How many hours had I sat here in contemplation, I wondered? I had sat with my eyes closed, but had still known intuitively when the attending sister would look away, and give me the chance to scratch my nose or shift my weight on the unyielding bench.

Khoeveld was plucking strands of glass from the flower plot. His lamplit shadow was eerie and long over the pavestones.

When he had a satisfactory handful he joined me on the bench. He laid the grass down between us and separated out two long pieces, inspecting them. When he had made his selection he began to tie a knot in the base of the stems so the strands were lying flush with each other. Here was another one of his fiddles, I supposed; when his hands had not been busy on the reins as we traveled, he had kept them busy in other ways, mostly by cracking nuts or drumming a rhythm on his legs, and on one eventful occasion, failing to juggle some rolled socks.

“How well do they teach history here?” he asked. “Fairly well, I imagine.”

I shrugged. “We learned about the ancestors and the wall, then about the warlords, the barbarians, and the kings, then of the three families. It was a full enough history.”

He twisted the top strand of grass away from himself, and brought it over and under the other piece. “Did they teach you about Lamoneric?”

I had to think. The name was familiar. “One of the warlords?” I guessed.

“It’s not surprising they don’t teach his story well.” He twisted the other strand and again, tucked it over and under. “It’s not a story that transitions well to moral lessoning. I suspect the older sisters contemplate it but keep tight lips.

“Lamoneric was the first of our kind,” he said. “He was the first king to ride a boghtmaw.”

I stared. He kept twirling and entwining his blades of grass. For once, the lamplight didn’t make him look more exhausted or enhance the shadows under his eyes. Instead, he looked more youthful. More alive.

“Well, not the first,” he amended. “There were others—many others, stretching back to the ancestors themselves, from the time the last brick was laid. But they were only stories, nameless legends. Lamoneric was the first to ride one into battle.”

He picked out a new piece of grass, laid it alongside one of the first, and seamlessly twisted it in.

“She came to him when he was nearly a man, and she made him a king. She slew his father and all of his brothers in the night. Her name was Sun Swallower. No books keep that name. I only learned it when I reached our cloister, along with the names of others. You will learn them, too.

“His enemies thought they were clever. Armed with a little knowledge, they rode out to face Lamoneric in the sunlight. They didn’t know the boghtmaw’s true nature. They had hidden away their precious things, their wives and children, away in caverns and castle dungeons.

“In dark places.”

Khoeveld fell temporarily silent, introducing more grass into the thin green cord he was weaving.

I felt ill. I pictured River, with her black eyes that were brown and gold in the light of flame, and I imagined her soft hoof-falls on dungeon stone. I imagined the echo of her rocky cackle in those ancient and narrow halls.

Khoeveld continued. “Lamoneric held power for many years until his enemies grew to know Sun Swallower—her preferred prey, her nightly rhythms. They captured her. For months they starved her, and once they had overthrown Lamoneric, they threw him to her. They expected a fitting end to him—but she wouldn’t touch him. No boghtmaw will drink the blood of a man or woman who has dreamed the dream, least of all their own rider.” His little cord was growing longer.

“So they weighed her down with heavy chains and left her in a pit open to the sky. Morning dawned, cloudless. By the time the sun had reached its highest point, there was nothing left of her in that pit, not even bone. She had withered away.”

I felt very sick now. Khoeveld seemed unaffected by his story. Looking up from his grass, he saw my face in the lamplight, and gave me a half-hearted smile.

“That is how the story is told, anyway. So many years have passed… who knows what really befell Lamoneric, or his mare? All we know with confidence is that he was the first of us. You likely know the ones that followed, even if you think you don’t: kings who were said to be blessed, or said to be cursed, or who held power by ‘unholy means’. It is easy to pretend that the three families are the blessed ones, as if they don’t wield the power of the boghtmaws just as the barbarians of the past have done. But of course, it’s different now. The nightmount and their monsters have been tamed.” I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he believed his own words, or if he were mocking the idea. “The three families hold our reins.”

That struck an intimate chord with me.

After all, Gannon was a daughter of the second family.

“That’s why,” he said, finishing his cord, and tying the ends together to make a circle. “There are no more kings.” He turned and placed the grass ring on my head like a crown.

Had he been preparing for that line the whole time?

I was amused and half exasperated by the gesture, but something about it put me genuinely ill at ease. I had a strange feeling that this was all rehearsed, like this story had been told before.

“What stops a rider from seizing power now?” I asked. “What bends a boghtmaw to the power of the crowns?”

“Executions.” He shrugged as if it weren’t something he worried about. “There are many sun-filled pits to be wary of, these days. But why would we want for power? We are well supplied, well respected, and we can go as we please… when the sun allows. It’s a good life. Leave power to the three families. We have the world.”

Was he trying to convince me, I wondered, or himself? I supposed anything was better than the life he had lived, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was dodging my eyes. That he was dodging some truth. That there was something he was as reluctant to discuss as the enigmatic Kholken.

“Not that there isn’t power within the cloister,” he said. “But the Karups bend knee to the families.”

“The Karups?”

“Adan and Ayes Karup. They are sister and brother by blood, as well as by the nightmount, and they lead it together. Ayes is diplomatic. Adan is as cruel as a northern winter. They are well respected. When you meet them, I suggest you find the floor very interesting. Better them think you a coward than overly bold.”

Hell on that, thought Husk, but I only let my face take on an air of somber reflection.

I took off the crown. “You never answered my question.”

“What question?” He was fiddling with a new piece of grass.

“About the dragon.”

Khoeveld tried to hide his flinch, but I was too quick to see it.

He knew of the dragon. He couldn’t pretend he did not.

He reached out impulsively, reclaimed the grass crown, and turned it over and over in his hands. “Do not trust every dream he sends to you. There is no such creature, not even in the valley.” He was unconvincing; his tongue was being held again.

“There was something.” I pressed him. “The colt wasn’t just coming out of the valley, he was being driven from it, too. What sort of creature could do that? The lore has been true so far. It says that they are swift, they are silent, that they shun sunlight, and that by their very nature they know no fear. You told me the tale of Lamoneric, and true, I did not know it, but I had heard the story of Sun Swallower. I heard she was a white mare that ate children and was murdered by the sun. I heard she went laughing to her death.”

He was silent for a long, tormented moment, trapped somewhere between his fear and his good intentions. He would not leave me here unanswered—he was too kind—but neither would he answer. From our first meeting he had been too kind and too unpracticed. A duller girl would have been impressed, and a sweeter girl would have been polite, but I was neither dull nor sweet. A century of contemplation on this bench couldn’t have dulled the sharp point of me. I could read all the truth about him.

I knew that when he met the Karups, he looked down.

“Alto,” he said. “Haven’t you enough to fear already?”

“That one lives for fear,” said a gritty and familiar voice. I turned to see small, slumped Scatterhorse, leaning on her dog beneath the arch. Seeing her there brought back memories in a rush. I had the powerful urge to seize a broom and start sweeping the pathway, and I straightened my back automatically.

As if she knew my instinct, she half-smiled and beckoned with her chin. “Come, child. It has been far too long since you sat in contemplation of the Sundial.

“Perhaps this night, it shall satisfy your hunger for fear.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this around the time my now wife and I visited Estes Park and hung out in the mountains doing mountain things and I proposed. I proposed using a ring that I made out of mountain grass using the method described here. I still have my 'first draft' practice rings sitting in a drawer by my bed and the cord is still tight. We've been married a little over a year and a half.


	11. cull

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _To every thing there is a season.  
>  (Turn, turn, turn)._

The room of the Sundial was open to the sky, with a system of cleverly rigged shutters to close over it in case of rain. Tonight, there was none, and to be at the top of that tower was to be among the very stars.

There had once been a winding staircase, but in more recent years a small, rising chamber had been installed to carry the oft-stricken Hillmothers who couldn’t mount steps. It operated on a system of invisible pulleys and counterweights that whispered and rattled behind the walls. I woke the sleepy operators, joined Scatterhorse in the box, and slowly, shudderingly, we ascended to the room of the Sundial.

The moon and the stars yawned overhead in a black roof.

There was only one lantern, and Scatterhorse snapped it alight with a sharp crack of flint. It was a strange, dangling orb of a lantern, suspended at the juncture of two chains that crossed overhead and formed an X in the center.

It was a glassy curiosity, cut with odd geometries and spackled with quartz. Stirred into motion by its lighting, it slowly turned, and as it did, it cast bizarre patterns of light that floated around the chamber. The light passed blindingly over me, then onto Scatterhorse, leaving me blinking, casting her half-slack features in full relief.

In the middle of the room was a great stone sundial. It was round, flat, and low to the ground like a table. It had been carved from a solid piece of silver mountain stone. The light of the strange orb made the crystalline flecks shimmer faintly.

The dial’s gnomon was shaped like the peak of the Torchspine. The hour lines and significant letters and numerals had once been hewn deep, but since then had weathered badly, almost to the point of illegibility. It didn’t matter now, for this sundial was no longer meant to tell the time.

There were newer and clearer marks laid over the old scores. Simple marks. They indicated east, south, west, and north, and beneath each mark was a single word.

East. _Bex._ Spring.

South. _Ilex._ Summer.

West. _Wax._ Fall.

North. _Cull._ Winter.

One, two, three, four.

A direction, a season, and a number, for each of the four books of the Sundial.

The light of the rotating orb gradually touched each one and passed on. The Hillmother and I watched and waited for it to become still. Her dog’s snuffling was a small and irreverent sound.

I looked at her shadow, and at her craggy face when the light passed it over. I remembered seeing that craggy face for the first time when I arrived at the convent. She had been the first thing to truly spook me. And, retaliatory over being spooked, I had demanded, “Be you a wytch?”

My suspicion at the time had been that she had traded half her body’s strength to God for unearthly power. My suspicions had only strengthened over the passing years, seeing her seed storms and frighten gardens into growth. Or so it had seemed. I had tried to sneak touches of her robe, as if I could steal the power for myself. When Scatterhorse caught me at it she warned me not to be so free with my hands. “’Hot coals appear, wherever children’s hands are near’,” she quoted, and snapped her flint in my face, scattering sparks, and I had fled to the tune of her laughter.

She had a laugh much like River’s.

“I remember my first reading,” she said. Her voice was soft, empty of storms. “In the days when it was customary to baptize children in the light. My mother brought me when I was a boy of six. The light was spun, and when it finally settled, it settled on the first verse of the fourth book.

“ _‘O, but beware that which is divine.’_ ”

My spine jolted.

She smiled her half-smile. “When you arrived, spun the light, and landed on the same verse, I knew that you would age into something peculiar. It is not a blessed verse… but it is full of promises.”

My air felt scarce.

“The light has settled,” she remarked. The lantern had indeed come to a standstill.

“It’s time for you to turn the light once more, Alto.”

I reached forward, my hand passing through rivulets of archaic firelight, to grasp the string that dangled from the bottom of the lamp. I gave it a hard tug and released.

The orb bounced once, and then began to spin wildly. Bewildering and ever-changing shapes were thrown upon the wall—I thought I saw words, I thought I saw whole codices, I thought I saw a giant buffalo, plunging, and then it was gone. I was dizzied, felt heady. The whole chamber became a vortex of light. Just as the first time, as Husk, as a child, I felt the hands of the old ancestors upon me. It was their light that drowned us, their captured fleck of sun, their first offense to God. _‘For though it burnt them, blinded them… they loved fire.’_

I went very far away.

When I returned, the chamber was dark once more, save for a single thin thread of light. It fell to mark a spot on the dial.

Scatterhorse bent to read, tracing her finger along the light line to find the ancient notch that marked my verse.  
She smiled up at me.

“The fourth book favors you.”

I stared down at the marker of the season, the accusing northerly arrow pointing me to home, pointing me to the Dragonhead.

_Cull._

Winter.

Scatterhorse straightened with some difficulty, leaning on the dog. “What author do you favor? Hallus, Meers?”

“Aidanan Blay,” I said. My mother had kept his translation. I wanted to hear my fate in her words.

Scatterhorse opened the shaft door and called down it. “Fourth book, Blay, amended.” Her voice was little more than a rattle, but it echoed, and in a matter of minutes the lift was drawn down and returned, carrying the tome and a freshly lit lantern. I hastened to retrieve them for her, resting them on the dial face, where the book fell open to some oft-checked page.

Scatterhorse leaned over the book and began to leaf through it. There was something strange about her already strange face. She turned the pages slowly—more slowly than her hand was slow. I realized why when she came to the final page: the final page of the fourth book, the very last words of the Sundial.

She dragged her finger down the last page to the bottom, where she recited from the Sundial in the words of Aidanan Blay, in the tradition of the ancients and the warlords and every successive king all the way down to the three families, in her cracking voice that so much like River’s.

She read:

“ _‘Flee.’_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a few questions the first time so I'll clarify that Scatterhorse is meant to be a type of trans character, who was born male and at least socially (as opposed to physically) transitioned into a woman's role, and is accepted as female. Her transition and her role as Hillmother are embedded in the religious traditions of this invented world. It's not fully analogous to any real world traditions or real world experiences and not meant to serve as representation.


	12. the black bond of Elegia

We fled at morning’s light. Khoeveld had already been stirred by some strange disturbance, but wouldn’t speak of it, avoiding my eyes and saying only that “River had ill dreams,” before going to tack up the caravan once more.

I worked up the boldness to go and see River on my own.

The time, I was not surprised to see her stalled without a door, nor to see how she towered in it, her horn-shaped ears nearly touching the ceiling. I did my best to ignore the sheep carcass lying drained in the corner.

She came to greet me with a friendliness that was surprising. Her voice jangling what must have been a hello, she came to the door and blew her breath into my face. It was so thick with fresh blood that I could taste it on my tongue.

I put my hands on her muzzle, and for a moment forgot my mission, delighted by the fresh discovery of how velvety soft her nose was. Despite the strangeness of her face, the oblong head, and the ridges of predator teeth showing in delicate lines along her cheeks, she felt like a horse. I missed _horses_. I missed my Delilah. The driving lorheads were little more than cattle. They had kind, blank eyes, and they chewed constantly and sleepily upon their bits. There was nothing to fear about them. I missed having a horse that you had to watch your fingers around.

River blew in my face again, and I grimaced and pushed her head away as if she were nought but a shovy pony.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” I told her, confiding in her just as I had once confided in Delilah, though River’s ears were too high to whisper into. She tilted her head to look at me with one eye. There was an amber color in her eye that wasn’t just firelight. “We’re headed north. I thought that meant I was going home, but, the closer I get, the more distant I feel—as if I never had a home at all. Maybe you understand. You are far from the birthplace of your breed. I am far away, too.”

She watched me with her amber eye, ears unmoving, and though it seemed impossible that this alien creature could comprehend human speech, I was convinced she understood every word.

“I don’t want to run away,” I decided out loud, and telling only her, and not knowing what I meant.

River made a hacking sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh. She opened her mouth. I saw her throat working, saw her struggling with the sound trapped in her poll. “ _Hhhhhk,_ ” she said. “ _Kh. Khh._ ”

Then she lashed her head—not up, but to the side like a snake. She gnashed her teeth and violently pawed the floor. I jumped back.

“She hates when language eludes her.”

Khoeveld stood arms-crossed in the aisle, watching his nineteen hand hellmare tear up the floor with only a look of wry amusement. “Has that anger ever helped?” he asked her.

She stopped thrashing, but pinned her ears and snaked her neck towards him this time. Her lips peeled off the pink of her gums. She crossed her jaw back and forth with a grating sound. She was standing only feet from me, an easy reach. My blood was cold.

He was unimpressed.

“We’re taking the caravan and driving through the dry day,” he said. “So it’s good-bye until after dusk. Shall I leave you angry, or will you be civil?”

River snorted out fetid air.

“Suit yourself,” said Khoeveld. “But don’t take out your ire on the good sisters.” He uncrossed his arms and turned to walk away, and I followed him. We walked up the passage towards the light.

“She hates being left behind,” he confided in me. “They’re not solitary hunters like the scimitar cats. They live together like horses, and hunt like wolves.” His casual words conjured a ghastly image: a string of boghtmaws ploughing through heavy snow, their eyes beady in the dark, hungering. “We almost never travel alone. Usually we ride with Kholken.”

“Why haven’t you been, in the time I’ve known you?”

“Kholken has… ill associations with the summer cities.” He used his words carefully, but at least he was saying something. “And had other business to attend to.” I didn’t push him, thinking it might encourage him to say more. It did not. The caravan awaited us at the gates, the lorheads hitched and looking better for a night spent off the road, and Khoeveld tossed a bag into the driver’s seat and went to go check their bits.

I stood at the gate and I looked back into the convent, seeing again the black hand of Elegia, lifted skyward.

Something drew me.

Khoeveld found me there when he was finished, parting the bluestem to find me visiting with Lady Elegia.

The statue was hewn of obsidian. The base was a rough, unshaped black podium, and climbing out of it was Elegia. She lay arched and prone in pain. Her feet dangled, toes nearly touching the ground, and one arm was grasping towards the earth as if she could tether herself to it. Her back was contorted, breast arched skyward. Her head, flung back, bore a face of agony. Her black palm was raised to the sky in futile entreaty.

It was artfully made. She looked real enough to breathe, soft enough to touch, and yet the stone bore invisible burrs to bloody any hand that would dare.

I wondered absently if Scatterhorse had gained her power the same way: stricken by God.

“Have you come to ask her blessing on our journey?” asked Khoeveld.

“Perhaps you ought to ask the blessing for me.” I couldn’t keep an unpleasant note out of my voice, which emerged somewhere between petulant and bitter. “For you know better than I what my future holds.”

Khoeveld was quiet. He seemed not abashed, nor irritated, only somber. He ran his fingers over the invisible black spurs of Elegia’s palm.

“I would ask only peace,” he said. “For my new sister.” He offered me his hand. Blood was welling up in small red dots.

_Give it to God,_ advised my mother’s voice. _Who are you to face all of creation unaided?_

I blooded my fingers on Elegia’s, then reached out and clasped his hand. It was hotter than I expected it to be. Perhaps night riders, too, ran as warm as their nightmarish companions. Our blood mingled and dripped, as it was meant to, onto the sacred samphire. For a moment I thought I heard it sizzle.

River called from the stable, and her voice was not a scream but a trill, and Khoeveld looked up, then back down me, and he smiled.

—

As we traveled north, we passed out of the uneasy forests of the barbarian dead and into hills and grassland. Odd and grandiose rock formations popped up here and there, rising to bound us on either side, and then ebbing and giving way to flatland once more. The grass was thin, yellow, and dry. The sky was enormous and free of cloud. I marveled at it. No boghtmaw could have passed through here except by cover of night, and I wondered if they could cross it even then. The land seemed boundless.

We stopped at the height of morning in the shade of a great boulder. The boulder sat alone in the middle of grassland with not a stone for company. It brought to mind a fable of my youth—giants, collecting marbles from the mountains and carrying them cross country to the salt flats where they held their tournaments. It looked as if a giant had dropped one here.

Khoeveld unharnessed the lorheads and hobbled them to let them graze. That done, he sat with his back to the boulder, comfortably covered by its shade, and began to unwrap some hardened oatcakes from the convent. He offered me one.

I shook my hands. “I want to look around,” I said. I had passed through this country once as a child, on my way to the convent, but I had no memory of it and I was intrigued.

“Be cautious,” he said. “And don’t go out of shouting distance. There are snakes.”

I chose the closest tallest hill for my vantage point, climbed it, and immediately looked down into an immense dry river. The breadth of it was astonishing. There was no disguising how mighty this river had been. It had likely been slow, for the path it left was much wider than it was deep, but the banks were still high and precariously sloped. An uprooted tree lay abandoned in the riverbed. The dry mud was cracked spectacularly, in patterns like spiderwebs, running in all directions and out of sight.

“What happened to the river?” I called down to Khoeveld.

He shouted back. “No rain. It’ll be back.”

I looked back down. There was a gnarled old root jutting out of the near bank, and I grabbed it, and hung onto that to slide down into the riverbed. Dry mud crunched satisfyingly under my feet as I landed. _The river will be back,_ I thought, and so would all the wild and beautiful things, I supposed, the birds and the flowers and the buffalo. It was a terrible pity that we had come now, before summer rains had hold of the land.

But it was still an awe to me.

I crunched across the river. The sun was brilliant here, unbroken by trees. I pulled my headscarf down to shield my eyes, and scanned the riverbed for something. I knew not what. Husk did; she wanted something new, something unexpected. I had to squint against the reflected light as I searched for that something—perhaps a washed-smooth riverstone.

It was Husk’s keen eyes that spotted hoofprints in the dirt. I might have dismissed them as the prints of some wild, abandoned thing, except that they were fresh. And wild, abandoned horses did not wear shoes.

I should have returned to Khoeveld, but out here, in this wild place, Husk had hold of the reins.

I followed the trail.

The prints ran up the opposite bank, where the hooves had scrabbled to climb it, but finally mounted the incline and continued on through a cluster of brush. Here were a few trees: scrappy things, leafless, that clearly missed their river. One of them had claimed a strand of horsetail in its branches. I pulled it away and examined the yellow strand with a small thrill. Perhaps this was what a boghtmaw felt tracking its prey—except that they were driven by ravenous hunger, and I, only by ravenous curiosity.

I parted brush to reveal a clearing in the sad and sandy grove. Here was a mucky watering hole, and around that was a motley camp inhabited by six men. Or rather, five men, and a boy, who should have been shaving if he knew what was good for him. He was holding the yellow pony whose hair I had found. He was in the middle of pulling off its saddle, and then he saw me, and dropped it with a thump. He stared at me. I stared at him. He had a dark face covered in a faint dusting of travel dirt, and he had enormous blue eyes.

The others had looked up at the sound of the thump. Their eyes all found me in the brush, and they stared, too.

I slowly closed the brush in front of me and squatted there, thinking, _'Oh.’_

There was silence, and then one of the men spoke. “Was that a girl?”

Husk said a very foul word, and I turned and raced back through the brush. It ripped at my clothes and whipped my face raw. When I reached the bank of the river, I skidded down it, slicing my hand on something invisible. I clenched my first around the blood as my feet hit cracked dirt. I had half crossed the dry river when I heard the clattering of hooves. One of the men slid down the embankment on a black horse. “Are you lost?” He laughed. Another rider emerged, whose alarmed horse tried to leap the bank, stumbled, and careened into the first rider. While the two of them swore and tried to spur their horses to rights, I raced across the river and dashed up the bank to my original vantage point.

I tripped immediately and slid down the hill, yelping as dirt ground itself into my cut palm. Khoeveld, at the base of the boulder still, was on his feet before I was.

“Men,” I shouted, to his unanswered question, and went to cut the lorheads’ hobbles. Khoeveld jumped up onto the caravan seat and disappeared inside of it.

I had the horses unhobbled, their head collars seized and trussed with rope, when the first two men reappeared at the top of the hill. They were joined only moments later by the others. All of them rode gaunt, curly-haired pacers with blunt heads, save for the boy, whose dainty-headed yellow lorhead stuck out like a sheep among boars.

“Where are you running off to?” asked the first man, still laughing. He had incredibly thick, dark beard, but I could still see his grin beneath it. He stood a breadth before the others, and they all seemed to look to him for direction. “There’s nowhere to run to for miles, not unless you’re-” He saw the caravan, and cut his words short, his face hardening to iron in a matter of moments.

His voice turned ugly. Forgetting me entirely, he shouted, “I see you, child thief! Traveling without your hellbeast? Are you so arrogant to think you could hunt us without it? Come out, coward, and meet your mistake.”

Khoeveld did come out—carrying a beastly crossbow. “I thought you were miles from the road,” he said, his voice serene. “Does this return mean you’re willing to be amicable?”

The man sneered. “Where’s the other one?”

“With the hellbeasts.” Khoeveld loaded a bolt. “I hope for your sakes that you are feeling amicable. The skies won’t be clear forever, and this land won’t host you much longer. Your horses are already wearing thin. Look at them. Let the boy take his place, and you can return to your homes without bloodshed.”

_The boy._ My eyes flew to him. He looked younger than me, with big enough eyes and a face still round enough to carry vulnerability, but the exhaustion in his face was older than he deserved. He was looking from one rider to another, from the caravan to the crossbow bolt, with deep uncertainty. He looked torn.

I recognized the look.

“You make prettier threats than your colleague,” sneered the black-bearded man.

“Who are you?” I blurted out. I could look only at the blue-eyed boy, who looked back at me now, with anguished recognition dawning on his face.

He didn’t speak, but the man threw an accusatory finger at me. “Has this one, too, been stolen for your coven?”

I broke away from the boy to stare at the man, surprised by him. Everything from his hair to the leather on his boots was rough. Before, he had frightened me, in the way that I had been raised to be frightened by strange men. Now, I was at once touched and repulsed by the way he looked at me—anguished. Angry.

“You needn’t go,” he told me. Why did he seem to plead with me? “Whatever they’ve told you. You’ll find nothing but despair under those mountains, nothing but black Yekaterin, an unending night carved out of ice. If you have a choice of fates, better a death of your choosing than the slow northern death.”

He held up a hand in offering, and squeezed his horse a single step down the hill.

_Thunk._

The crossbow bolt buried itself in the base of his horse’s neck, right where it tied into the chest. Blood popped out in a jet, like from an uncorked bottle, and the horse collapsed with its legs scrambling. The man was barely able to jump off and get clear before the horse lay thrashing on its side. It spasmed only briefly, then went mostly still, twitching and heaving its last breaths.

“You’re short another horse,” said Khoeveld, loading another bolt. “Do you still plan to linger in this arid place? Rains won’t come for days—and when they do, so shall our breed.”

I stared at the shadow of blood crawling down the hill. It was sinking into the dry earth, so eager to drink once more.

Slowly, dragged by its own weight, the dead horse began to slide down the hill.

The blue-eyed boy swung off his lorhead and dragged it down the hill to the unmounted man, urgently trying to hand him the reins. “I’ll go,” he cried. “There’s no point in this.” They had to be family of some sort, though they bore little physical resemblance. His voice was too desperate.

But the man only shoved him away. “Let no one say I was the first to draw blood,” he said. He pulled out a narrow seax.

Khoeveld hefted his crossbow again. “Alto, get in the caravan,” he said.

“No,” said I, not just in instinctive willfulness, but in horror of the fear of the boy and the repugnant bleeding of the horse, and in confusion. What had the man said? _‘...nothing but black Yekaterin...’_

“Alto,” he snapped, turning his head, and in that second of distraction, one of the other men whipped up a bow and let fly an arrow. I didn’t see it strike, but I saw the blood race down Khoeveld’s firing arm, and saw him bring it up and aim with black eyes.

A fresh crossbow bolt buried itself in the throat of the man who had shot—but it wasn’t Khoeveld’s.

A white horse came skidding down the rocks to the left, scattering shale. It was streaked with streak, its nostrils and eyes a flaming red. It bore nothing but a rope around its jaw and a veiled rider dressed in innocuous travelers’ brown. They dug their heels into the beast’s sides and it leapt the last few feet to the ground. As it landed, the rider loosed another bolt, which met its brother in the chest of the already-dead man, toppling him from his mount.

The others scrambled for weapons, but the rider kicked their mount on in one great leap, slamming into the smaller horses. The white horse was taller, broad-chested, and seemed half-mad. It seemed to thrash the other horses because it could not thrash the rider on its back. It tried to leap over one of the pacers to escape the rider’s spurs, only to have its head twisted and shoulder slammed into the opponent. The pacer was knocked to its knees, and the veiled rider managed to knife the falling man thrice before he fell from his horse and landed choking in the sand.

The rider wheeled their white horse around on its hocks to descend on the bearded man. The rider brandished a long and red-brown blade.

“The boy!” shouted Khoeveld.

The blue eyed boy had already wheeled his horse into their path, while the bearded man leapt around with his seax. The rider booted him in the face. Still the man managed to slash a long, deep wound in the shoulder of the white horse, and the beast went into a fit of bucking. With no saddle, it seemed impossible that the rider should stay seated, but they did. They pulled the horse’s head around to their toe and spurred it punishingly with every leap.

The last of the mounted men bolted, leaving the corpse of a horse and of a man, the boy, his protector, and the yellow lorhead.

Khoeveld leapt from the caravan seat with a speed I hadn’t seen, and with a silence I hadn’t thought possible, met the bearded man from behind with a knife to the throat.

The man dropped his seax at the order Khoeveld didn’t have to give.

The rider’s white horse finally gave it up, stumbling to a standstill. The rider sprang lithely to the ground. Looping the rope once more around the horse’s head, they hauled it forward, stomping through the rising dust.

“I expected you nearly an hour ago,” reproached Khoeveld, releasing the man to the stranger’s grasp.

“They killed my horse,” said the stranger, tugging down their veil. “Had to catch another.”

The stranger was a woman. She was exceptionally pale, with gray eyes, hollows in her cheeks, and dark circles beneath her eyes. “Mount up and disappear,” she said, shoving the man so that he bounced off the shoulder of the yellow lorhead. “Go. Live. Plant your vengeance in some sad summer hole, or I will slay you here, and you will feed bird and carrion cat alike, and God will never find your bones.”

The man said something dark and foul. Unsurprised, she seized his collar, slit his cheek, and threw him facefirst into the dirt. “For my brother’s face,” she said. “And I’ll charge the rest to your city. If your lord is generous, he’ll pay in gold, and not in your blood.” She kicked him with her spur, and he finally scrambled up, grappling with the lorhead’s reins and hauling himself into the saddle.

The woman didn’t allow him a look back at the boy he was abandoning, whipping the horse across the rump with the flat of her blade. The frightened thing fled in pursuit of its companions.

“Hold this.” The woman thrust the rein of her makeshift bridle into the hands of the boy. The horse stood trembling and blowing hot air, and the boy stared at it with the exact same shocked, blank eyes.

The woman grabbed Khoeveld by the back of the head. Ignoring the beginning of a complaint, she pulled a cloth from her small side bag and pressed it against the wound on his face. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose an eye,” she said. “You’ll have a scar, but that’s not so unfortunate. Maybe it will even make you handsome.”

“I call that ill fortune. How will I work with admirers dogging my every step?” His voice was dry, but amused, and he tolerated her ministrations. Though she was much taller, and her face was hard, she handled him gently.

_Kholken._

Her eyes were older, and her face was scarred, but there was no mistaking the resemblance.

She looked almost exactly like Gannon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the statue of Elegia is inspired by Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa


	13. the land of the whales

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _To a bright new day,  
>  and to old troubles,  
> given to God and washed away._  
> -a Book of Odes, Corl Hallus

I sat in the back of the caravan on the floor wrapped in a blanket, listening to the wood creak and the occasional click of a rock bouncing off a wheel. It was warm still, but I didn’t feel it. Calm had settled over me like a frost.

Khoeveld and Kholken were having an animated discussion in the front seat, and if I had been myself, I would have been listening with eager ears, but I was not, and I did not.

The boy was asleep on the floor next to me. Kholken had given him a flask of something. I didn’t know if it had been drugged, or held some strong spirit, but soon after drinking he had become drowsy and fallen into a deep sleep. Khoeveld didn’t have to ask me to watch over him. I was already preoccupied with the boy’s dusty, scratched face, and what it represented. I was too preoccupied to feel abandoned or delegated as Khoeveld dove into reunion with his fellow rider.

I watched the boy’s sides slowly rise and fall. He had curled up into a ball. It reminded me of a particular little dog from Gannon’s pack, one that had always made itself small in a corner when it was frightened.

I had had plenty of time to inspect the boy, and eventually I had concluded that he was younger than me—fifteen, if I had to guess. He looked half eaten by the road. It had stolen much of his baby fat from him. His clothes were thin and worn through at the elbows, and he was thin underneath them, with protruding shoulder bones and very long, almost skeletal looking fingers, though part of that was his youth. He was going to be tall when he was grown.

I wondered how long he had been out in the dry day, running from his dream.

“How is he?”

I looked up with a stiff chill, for it was Kholken. Underneath her road wrappings, discarded earlier, she was somewhat grotesque to look upon. She had Gannon’s yellow hair, but it was cut very short, and her eyes were more gray iron than the soft silver cloud I remembered. The similarity was discomforting enough. More discomforting were her many small mutilations, distracting from the familiarity of her face. One of her ears was mostly gone. I found myself wondering if it had been cut off, or bitten away by some creature. There was a small dent in her left temple. Based on the way she turned her head, I suspected something had struck and blinded her on that side. On the other side of her skull there was a larger, shallower indentation. It gave her head an odd shape. What was oddest was that, for all the marks, she still had an odd beauty, with the same pointed chin and pale cheeks of Gannon.

The scars and the bleakness of her eyes aged her a great deal, but looking now, I realized she was not as old as I had thought. She could not have been much more than thirty.

“He’s asleep,” I said obtusely.

She looked sharply at me, likely wondering whether I was stupid or reticent. “You’re the violinist from the summer city?” Her tone made it an insult.

_I am Husk, of the northern cattle trains,_ I wanted to fire back, but I said nothing and only matched her gaze, trying not to be disturbed by the similarity to Gannon. Gannon had had that look once that I could recall, coming upon a serving man beating a dog.

“I played in the court of Gannon, a daughter of the second family,” I said instead, making my voice very bland.

She lifted her lip. “Khoeveld said that you were acquainted with my cousin,” she said caustically.

No wonder Gannon had been familiar with the night rider passing through the city.

“I didn’t know that a member of the second family could be summoned to the nightmount,” I said. Gannon had never mentioned it.

“The mountain takes what it wants. Calls whomever it pleases.” I couldn’t tell if Kholken meant to insult me by that, too. Before I could decide, or Husk could take offense, her tone abruptly changed. “Make sure he eats something when he wakes up.” Then she took her leave.

Kholken walked back down to the front of the caravan, beyond the many boxes and barrels, to resume conversation with Khoeveld out of earshot.

The boy’s eyes popped open.

How long had he been listening?

He stared at me, and I back at him.

When he didn’t speak, I turned, dug out a pouch of pemmican, and held it out to him. I also offered him another flask. He looked at my hands in suspicion.

“It’s just water,” I said.

He downed the whole thing. He drank as if he hadn’t had clean water for weeks, and maybe he hadn’t.

“Thank you,” he said. His voice was raw. He took the pemmican tentatively, looking at me, wary still. For having such big, long-lashed eyes, they were guarded.

I couldn’t fault him for it.

“Are you one of them?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. My palm still throbbed with Elegia’s promise. A blood blond was not carelessly made, nor easily broken—but I held no blood bond with the nightmount as a whole. Nor did I desire one, if Kholken was exemplary of the breed.

“I was called by a creature of the valley,” I said. “And they are taking me to him.”

His forehead creased. “Does that mean that you are, or you aren’t?”

“I’m no more one of them than you are,” I avoided. “You should really eat something.”

He took his first bite, still looking upon me in doubt, and I was reminded strongly of my youngest brother, and persuading him to eat his morning porridge. This boy looked like he could use several weeks of morning porridge. “How long were you on the road?” I asked.

He picked at a bit of berry.

“They passed through our town almost two months ago,” he said. “Claiming to be spicers, but we knew what they were. My cousin spotted their creatures that night, lingering outside of the wolf walls and blowing steam under the moon. We gave the riders board and courtesy. The man continued on with his caravan, but she stayed.”

I wondered if Kholken had made friendly overtures, as Khoeveld had.

“That night I had a dream that I was in the mountains, where I met a red mare. It was a strange dream. I had never seen mountains before. I had never seen a horse like her. I didn’t know what she was. I forgot the dream, but when I walked through the square the next day, I passed the wytchdog, and it began to scream. That night the rider came to my home and said I didn’t belong there anymore.”

He spoke softly, but quickly, as if he had only a little time to tell me the story.

“My family agreed, but in the morning, my father snuck me away under the cover of daylight. We rode away from our town into the land of the whales.”

“The land of the whales?” I was temporarily distracted from his story.

“This place,” he said, indicating with his hand the land that we were crossing through. “Where you found me.”

“It’s a desert,” I said.

“It wasn’t always.” Something about this lore seemed to cheer him. “All through the hills you can find the bones of whales, buried in the very rock. They appear after the rains. Other fish, too, and strange plants turned to flat stone.” He held up a hand and rolled his fingers like a wave. “God drained the sea, crushed its creatures into the mud.” He smacked his hand down onto the floor in a dramatic illustration. “And they became a part of the land.”

I wasn’t sure I believed his story.

“It’s true,” he said, reading the skepticism in my face. “I could show you. There’s a rockslide where…” He stopped talking. He had just remembered that he was being taken away. _He might never see those lands again,_ I thought, and perhaps he thought it as well.

“I lived by the sea,” I said, to divert his melancholy. “Once, I was on a boat, and a whale passed below us. It was enormous, many times larger than the skiff. They were afraid it would upset us into the water, but it only sank away and disappeared. A minute later it blasted water into the air, already far away from us.”

His eyes were wide and impressed, his troubles temporarily forgotten.

“Once,” he said, following my story with another. “I dreamed that a whale made of bones climbed out of the sand, and it crawled to the wolf walls and started knocking to be let in.”

I started laughing at the idea. He was laughing too. I shouldn’t have said anything, but before I could close my mouth, I was already asking, “Do you ever dream about dragons?”

He looked almost proud. “I don’t need to dream about dragons,” he said. “I’ve seen them.”

It would be nightfall before I understood his meaning.


	14. all colors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _The Werlaan were in the earth and the air and the sea, but Man knew not their fang nor their fire, for Man is to Werlaan what an insect is to Man._  
>  -the First Book of the Sundial, as translated by Aidanan Blay

I didn’t look out of the caravan until it was nearly night, because I didn’t want to tempt interaction with Kholken, nor leave the boy unwatched. Eventually, when the window of sky I could see had begun to darken into purple, I went to look and see if we were still in the land of the whales. I wondered if we could see the mountains yet.

I looked, and realized that even if the mountains were within range, I wouldn't see them, for we were bounded by rock on all sides.

Gazing out over the heads of Khoeveld and Kholken, I saw that we were driving through a channel of red stone. It was a narrow slip of a canyon, wide enough only to allow our passage, but its walls loomed high, enclosing us in shadow that was only deepening as the daylight waned.

Khoeveld glanced back at me and smiled. His face was bandaged but bright; reuniting with his grim partner seemed to have cheered him. “Almost nightfall,” he said. “River will join us soon.”

It seemed impossible that River could close the distance so quickly. I imagined her hooves eating up the earth, crossing those hills and their hidden bones without touching them. I imagined a solitary black arrow gleaming in the naked moonlight.

There were still no clouds.

The canyon widened, and opened up suddenly into a space as grand as a templar sanctuary. It was nearly large enough to hold a small village. Here, you could see where the floods had come and gone and weathered away the stone, leaving strange and horizontal bands of color all along the walls. I felt irrelevant and small. 

Something about the size made me uneasy and reminded me of the boy’s dream of walking whales. This looked like a resting place for giants, or giant things.

Khoeveld _‘whoa’_ ed the horses, and was quick to hop down and get to work, whistling as he went.

“Is it really safe to stay here?” I asked Kholken.

“Ha!” she said, and followed Khoeveld, jumping down from the seat.

I looked back at the boy, asleep again, before hopping down myself.

The boy’s yellow pony and the white horse had both been tethered to the caravan to follow alongside our dutiful lorheads. Khoeveld was loosing the lorheads from their harness, and the boy’s from its tether, hobbling their legs again and putting them in feed bags. Kholken’s white horse remained tethered and went unfed. He looked spent. His sides were raked red from her spurs, and his lips were swollen and abraded from the makeshift bridle.

“What about him?” I asked. I lifted a hand to pat him, and stopped short when he threw his head. His eye was rimmed with red. He really was a wild thing.

“We don’t need that one,” said Kholken, unloading firewood from a slot in the side of the caravan.

“Why not let him go, then?”

“Someone might get hungry.” She dumped an armful of stout logs into my arms. “Go help with the fire. I want a hot meal. I’m not eating another damn bite of hard, dry travelers’ bread.”

I did as I was told and joined Khoeveld where he was knelt down arranging kindling. He smiled up at me. “I’d say that her bark is worse than her bite, but they’re both venomous.”

“How long have you known her?” I asked, handing him the logs.

“Since River,” he said. “She hated me at first, too.”

“She hates me?”

Realizing his words, he cringed, and backtracked with a glib, “Kholken hates everyone.”

As if to prove it, Kholken pulled the boy from the caravan with the expression of a woman handling offal. She sent him over with his own armful of wood. Khoeveld accepted it with a kind look, perhaps trying to make up for her harshness. I heard Kholken clanging around in the caravan. A minute later her head popped out.

“Did you throw out the sausages again?” she demanded.

He shrugged. “They smelled rancid.”

“You say that every. Damn. Time.” She smacked the side of the caravan for emphasis and disappeared back inside.

“And I’m not lying, either,” said Khoeveld under his breath. “She’ll cheer up once she’s eaten," he reassured us. "And when the others arrive.”

“What others?” asked the boy. I didn't have to.

I was myself cheered by the idea of River joining us. This was a dead and alien place, empty of even the sounds of insects, and as night fell, it was only becoming colder and stranger. There was a comfort in River's presence - that of a breathing, four-legged furnace - and a reassurance in knowing that she was the most deadly thing in the night.

Khoeveld soon had the wood ablaze, and Kholken had slapped a pan atop it to stir up a rough stew of salt game and haphazardly chopped root vegetables. The pan crackled and spat hot fat. Overhead, constellations were blooming, but I didn’t look at them. Instead, I turned an oat cake over in my hands, thinking of the salt-dipped reinbread of the convent, and feeling suddenly sacrilegious for not putting aside a piece for prayer. I broke off a corner and discretely tossed it into the fire.

There were no birds to carry it to heaven, here. _Perhaps the smoke will do._

Neither Kholken nor the boy noticed, but Khoeveld did. He smiled, broke off his own piece, and copied my gesture. Then he nudged me and pointed at the canyon wall opposite us.

I looked. My mouth fell open.

The gargantuan skeleton of a creature, entombed in the vast and rocky height, was being illuminated by our tiny speck of a campfire. It dwarfed our tiny campsite, like the whale that had once dwarfed my sea skiff, but on a grander scale. It loomed as a terrible and impossible statue.

The skull was enormously long, with jaws that could have easily swallowed the caravan. It was filled with teeth that were at least as long as I was tall. What I could see of the body was made of rippling spine, vertebrae as large as temple blocks, stretching along the whole wall and out of sight. The ribcage was mostly consumed by stone, but beneath, I could see the claws of its great fanned fingers poking free.

The firelight crawled in its empty eye sockets as if it lived again.

“You asked about dragons,” said Khoeveld. His voice was low, but loud in the vast space, as if the empty air were hungry to be filled.

“I told you I saw them,” whispered the boy, for the first time since Kholken had pulled him from the caravan. He looked at Khoeveld and they shared a cautious smile.

Kholken snorted. She doled stew out into a bowl and thrust it at the boy. “Fill yourself with food, not folk talk. You’re destined for the road and the wild; neither story nor scholarship will help you. Let bones be bones. And don’t follow Khoeveld’s example; you need flesh and fat to grow.” She shot him a glare.

Khoeveld raised his eyebrows and took an exaggerated, crunching bite of oatcake.

I pulled my blanket closer around my shoulders and turned my back on the dead and staring thing. I felt as if I could still feel its long-gone eyes upon me. The night had enveloped the canyon, and it was cold. The food and the fire warmed me only slightly. When I had left the summer city, I had taken a core of warmth from it, and held it fast in my heart. All I had to think of was the blue gown and the garden, and the color of the sea, of Delilah’s pinned ears, and Gannon’s delight in her ugly blackcurrant dress. And I was warm.

But those loved and remembered things were so distant now, I could scarcely believe I had lived them.

The coal of the summer city was cooling rapidly in my heart.

How long would the light of it last?

I was gazing out, away from the light of the fire, when I realized that there were four floating coals watching us in silence—a silence that seemed even more silent for the presence of two boghtmaws.

Fear and delight flirted within me, but refused to mingle, like water and oil.

River’s voice came in a soft and poignant whistle.

The other made no sound at all.

Khoeveld, grinning, whistled back, but Kholken didn’t even look up from her stew. “Don’t just lurk politely in the dark,” she said crossly to her creature. “These two are destined for worse things than you, they had best become accustomed.”

River came in at a bit of a dance, reminding me of Delilah on her freshest mornings, her white star emerging charmingly from the dark. She went immediately to plant her nose on Khoeveld’s head and blow hot breath through his messy hair. He made a face and reached up to squish her nostrils. She looked at me sideways with that single eyed, reptilian stare, and clicked her throat in what must have been a boghtmaw hello.

When Kholken’s stallion stepped into the light, I was struck with a revelation that should not have surprised me: the boghtmaws didn’t have to be dark to blend into the night. I had assumed many of them were black, as River was, for silence and duplicity was the way of the predator. But why should any law of predation dictate to their kind? They had no need for darkness. With their light feet, with their speed, with their strength, they needed no further advantage. They wanted none.

Death came to their prey in all colors.


	15. the speech

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Build the wolf walls three cubits deep and six cubits high. Paint them yellow or blue. The wild and the hungry will learn your colors, and travelers and their goods will not pass you by._  
>  -the Third Book of the Sundial, as translated by Aidanan Blay

He was a white dun with black eyes and a black mane that hung raggedly, thick with burrs and wytch knots. His head was blunter than River’s, with the larger jowl of a stallion. The outline of his canine teeth bulged clearer where they pressed against his cheeks. His was maybe a hand shorter than River—not a meaningful difference when she was pushing nineteen, and he made up for the lost inches in bulk. Though he was still a lithe thing, the muscles of his shoulders were especially well defined, and his neck was thicker and more crested. He looked more wolven, while she favored the cat.

He didn’t offer Kholken the same snuffling hello, nor she did seem to expect one. He did not snort, click, or cackle. In his silence, in the firelight, he was ghostly.

Which was more characteristic of the breed, I wondered. River, or this strange stallion?

“This is Tuskgut.” Khoeveld was the one to introduce him.

“Tuskgut?” I repeated.

The stallion graciously turned and sidled his haunches over, revealing a massive scar. It was a wide ridge that ran from armpit to flank in a single rake, telling the story of a vicious wound. Hair refused to grow there.

No living thing should have survived it—and yet, there he stood.

“What kind of creature can do that?” I wondered out loud.

Tuskgut grunted. “Pig,” he said.

The boy next to me made a soft noise, the first he had since the two arrived, his hands flying over his mouth to compress the sound of horror. I could only stare.

Khoeveld noted our shock with amusement. “Tusk is more eloquent than River. He has the advantage of his years.”

River pinned her ears and aimed a petulant kick at the stallion, who only pinned his ears back and moved his haunches out of range.

“Parts of the valley are thick with hell pigs,” said Kholken, sidestepping the subject of his speech entirely, impatient with our shock. “Wild boars as big as cattle. Our friends like to use them as a proving ground—especially young stallions.” She gave Tuskgut a disapproving look. He flicked his tail, unrepentant.

I was still shaken. His words were ours, but distorted, like the same tune played on a different instrument. His was a grating cello to my clear-throated violin.

I wondered if River’s voice would sound the same, and realized that I didn’t want to know. I had become accustomed to the boghtmaws’ size, their teeth, their smell, but with Tusk’s single word, they became monstrous once more. No creature deserved both physical prowess and mastery of language.

The ancestors had been right to put a wall between us.

“This is Shy, and this is Alto.” Kholken pointed to the boy and to me in turn. At the sound of my name, Tusk made a sound much like River’s cackle, but bassier. Like the cracking of a lightningstruck pine. He looked at me, and my spine prickled. “Now that we’re all properly introduced, we should be on our way. We need to reach forest before sun-up.” She got to her feet and dusted off her palms, speaking to Khoeveld. “I’ll take the caravan. Take River and ride ahead. Lychold is waiting at Hoghead; there are others to collect.”

“What others?” asked Khoeveld, and then, sounding indignant, repeated, “Lychold?”

“Don’t be childish,” she said. She scowled. “He found three in the west, and Malix and Biraldi two in the east.”

“That’s impossible,” said Khoeveld. His expression changed, from mulish to confused. “There are already eleven at Yekaterin.”

“No,” she told him grimly. “There are now twenty.”

Khoeveld went very pale. I had never seen him frightened before, only disturbed and urgent, on the balcony at Gannon’s white house. I had thought his intensity then was fear. Now, I saw his fear was the kind that turned to silence.

“What does that mean?” The boy, Shy, spoke for the first time since River and Tuskgut had emerged from the darkness.

Kholkhen and Khoeveld shared a moment of silence. He looked lost, and she, reluctant to answer.

“Something is driving them out of the valley in greater numbers,” she said finally. “In a normal season, we see only three or four. Now, nearly ten times as many…” She trailed off with a frown.

“Have the Karups any insight?” asked Khoeveld. The way he stared at her, I felt myself forgotten, that his task of collecting me had fallen suddenly by the wayside.

“Only orders,” she said, and bluntly ended the conversation by issuing her own. “Meet Lychold. See that his few reach Yekaterin. I’ll see to these two.”

She trod out the last embers of the fire.

The eye of the dragon on the wall were snuffed out.

\--

The blood of Kholken’s white horse had dried by the time the caravan was ready to move, and Tusk was finishing licking his chops while Khoeveld finished grabbing and discarding miscellaneous essentials. He was obviously distracted. The only item he was certain off was an odd conglomeration of leather straps, the function of which became clear when he tossed it onto River’s back from the high step of the driver’s seat. She stood obligingly while he went about fastening it around the base of her neck, running one strap between her forelegs to fasten to the girth, all forming a web of straps clearly meant to secure the saddle, though there didn't seem to be one.

As I looked on, he hooked his foot in a loop stirrup and swung aboard. He settled on as light as a butterfly on a leaf. He may as well have been one for all that River cared or seemed to feel his weight. He began buckling the final straps over his thighs.

It was a queer contraption, but it wasn’t what struck me as odd.

“Where’s the bridle?” I asked.

Khoeveld laughed. Momentarily cheered, he scratched River’s withers. She lifted her head and curled her lip just like a horse.

“No one bridles a boghtmaw,” he said. "Hand me the bags?"

I did, and as he began to secure them to the leathers, I reached out to give River a pat of my own. She curled her neck around to crackle a good bye in my ear. I fought the dangerous impulse to wrap my arms around her enormous neck and press my face into the heat of her shoulder.

“She’ll see you again soon,” said Khoeveld, and I couldn’t tell if he was speaking to me or to River.

“Still wasting time?” demanded Kholken, sticking her head out the side of the caravan. She scowled at our sentiment before pulling back inside. “Get lost!” she shouted from within.

“Get those knots out of Tusk’s mane,” he shouted back. “Just because you don’t own a comb doesn’t mean he should have to suffer for it!”

He had no right to criticize anyone about having no comb, I thought, and then he looked back down at me. I felt a pang. I refused to remember what I remembered about leaving the city, of Faran fighting her tears and Yune not fighting hers at all. I didn’t think about how distantly Gannon had stood, and how for the first time since I met her, her pale skin had seemed truly white, and her eyes had been like glass, and I had said so little, because I had thought I would have years to explain myself to her.

All of that behind me already, and now, here were my two remaining allies about to disappear just as swiftly.

It must have showed in my face.

Kheoveld smiled at me. I had never met someone so unafraid of smiling. His was always empty of intentions, empty of sorrow or fear. Clear. He lifted his palm where Elegia’s bite was still bright and red. I lifted my matching palm, and he grinned broadly.

“Soon,” he promised. “We will ride together.”

He stirred River with his leg, and her whole body shifted back like a cat’s, to spring. Muscle upon muscle shifted rapidly like gears on an ancient mechanism. I thought I could smell the metal heating, the steam of it blowing out of her excited nostrils.

She leapt.

For a moment she hung in my eye: a great black curl, not horse nor beast of any kind, but a thing unto itself. Muscle that only existed to carry death. Bone that existed only to host teeth. The ripe barbarism of night, taken to flesh.

And then they had gone, in silence, into the dark.

They hung for a while in my eye still, like an afterimage left by the sun.


	16. the man at Beadcroes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Misogyny._  
>  -commentary on Aidanan Blay's translation of the Sundial, Sarga Meers

It rained for days.

It was fortunate we left the canyon trail when we did, Shy told me, for by now it would be a vicious river of white water, and the hills would be swamped from the highest of them. I thought it was unfortunate, for I would have liked to see the land of the whales so transformed, and to see if more curious bones had been revealed.

Kholken was not curious.

Kholken hated the rain.

Kholken hated a great many things.

“No whistling,” she snapped, when I tried to teach Shy how, and, “Stop making noise!” when I told him the story of my leap into the bay with Delilah, and he burst out laughing. When we finally confined our conversations to a whisper, she still grumped, “Stop conspiring back there.”

Shy, much emboldened after several days of good food and proper sleep, and having quickly decided to find a friend in me, rolled his eyes as high as they could go.

Out of boredom, I finally resorted to plucking grass whenever we stopped and winding grass cords as Khoeveld had shown me at the convent. Twist, take the strand over and down, twist the other strand, over and down. I taught it to Shy and he took to it with a spirit. Soon there were grass bangles hanging from both our wrists, wound around the rafters in decorative boughs, and of course, on our heads and in our hair.

I was sure Kholken would order it all thrown out, when she returned from hunting game with a tassel of swinging grouse and saw how we had bedecked the place. But she didn’t. She stepped up into the caravan, looked around at it all, then developed a strange expression, and just set me to drive while she plucked the birds beneath the garlands.

She had deemed both of us useless for important tasks. I was easy to dismiss, coming from the luxurious cradle of the summer city, but Shy had a menagerie of boyish skills: tree climbing, egg finding, fire starting—all things Husk had once done, and missed desperately.

Shy wasn’t allowed them, either.

After a few days of doing nothing on the road, it dawned on me with bitterness that we were not passengers, but baggage.

Kholken resorted to the schedule of a night rider without warning. After my time with Khoeveld, I was accustomed to sleeping at strange times in strange places, but Shy took to it poorly. He often kept watch during the day, weaving long cords of grass by himself, disregarding them by nightfall. When he did sleep, it was fitful sleep at best, and sometimes he leaned his head against my shoulder as we traveled and just slept there.

“Khoeveld should have gotten dogs,” grumped Kholken, who slept poorly no matter the hour. She was developing shadows under her eyes nearly as purple as Khoeveld’s. I wondered if it were the strange hours or the unspoken concern they had shared that caused it. “And better horses.”

The problems was not with the lorheads, I thought, but with her impatience, and with the mud of the spring road. It was difficult going, and she didn’t rest them as often as Khoeveld had. They were growing wan and miserable. When the whip wouldn’t stir them, the snap of Tusk’s teeth at their heels sent them scrambling.

The lorheads were the reason we stopped at Beadcroes.

The Unnamed river split north from south, and Beadcroes lay upon the river. Beadcroes had grown, disassembled, and repaired itself year after year, as the river changed and the land waxed and waned. It was a necessary but peculiar stopping point. Its people weren’t truly its people, for it wasn’t truly a town, which made it an ideal place to dodge enforcers and tax collectors. The residents opened and closed their storefronts and shop stalls in cycles of weeks. The Beadcroes of one month was a different town altogether from the Beadcroes another month past. The traders, tax dodgers, sunlanders, caravaners, and mobile crafters came and went in the same way the river ebbed; all they left behind were strands of beads, dangling from sills and signposts, bearing the colors of people long gone and bragging of their passage.

We crossed the bridge into Beadcroes at night. Lamplight distorted the shapes of the buildings and shop stalls. The rattling of beads came to me on a cold wind, and only then did I realize that I had been here before.

I remembered sitting in front of Badger, my oldest brother, mounted on a half bouson nag whose face had long surrendered to gray. Badger had been tasked with finding a good price for the hogs we could no longer afford to feed. In the end, he had to barter some of the promised hogs for a new mount, because our old gelding could go no farther. We got a handful of coins for him from a dogger working out of a temporary and gory stall.

Our mother had railed on Badger upon our return; he had been meant to go to the nearer eastern crossing, where sat a respectable trading post. He had chanced Beadcroes in hopes of getting a better price from the sunlanders. He didn't get one. That had been a bitter winter.

_'Do you know what could have happened to your sister?’_ my mother had demanded.

He had left the next spring.

The caravan passed by what I thought was the very stall where we had left our old nag, and it was empty now but for a curtain of rattling beads.

All of the stores were closed in the night. There were only a few taverns still alive, and even their light spilled only in thin lines from slot windows, leaving yellow stripes of firelight on the pavement. They feared the night here. It was too far north not to.

Shy poked out his head in great curiosity, watching the tavern fall away behind us.

“They don’t have wolf walls,” he said.

Kholken pulled him back in. “They don’t want them. They’re pelt-hungry, this side of the river. You too, back inside.” She spoke to me now, and duly I withdrew and shut the side window.

“Tusk is gone,” I said.

“It will be hard enough coaxing these cagey rustics to barter without a boghtmaw looming over my shoulder. I already smell too much like the law.” She snorted.

Shy and I exchanged a glance. He was bold enough to voice what we were both wondering. “Doesn’t the nightmount uphold the law?”

“We put down rebellion, slaughter the corrupted, patrol the ancestral walls. I could care less about some bauble maker dancing a jig around taxes.”

There was a caravanserai with its torches lit in the heart of the cobbled together town, and there we stopped. Kholken had a heated discussion with the man posted at its triangular entrance who wanted bribing. Ultimately she threw a handful of coins at his feet, spat, and called him something wincingly profane. I was learning a lot of profanities from Kholken—more than I had learned from any sailor. (‘Sideways fucking hogspawn’ was most common, though she also favored ‘incestuous summer pig’ and ‘bloody half-born uncauled mule’.)

Kholken squared away the caravan in one of many slots around the interior ring of the caravanserai, and stalled the lorheads, who plunged their heads gratefully first into water troughs and then into hay. As for us, we had a chamber that was small but proper, and closed fully against the cold of the night. There was a slow-burning candle, notched, marking the late hour. There was even a wash room.

Shy fell onto a furnished cot and wrapped himself in its fur.

“Get some sleep,” said Kholken. It was not a suggestion but an order, given as if from a grumpy caretaker to a number of vexing children. “I want useful eyes when the market rises. I don’t feel like slicing fingers off of hopeful thieves, and I don’t need either of you giving them hope.”

She didn’t have to tell Shy. I thought he had fallen asleep the moment he buried his face in the fur.

Kholken was almost as quick to drop off, as instantaneous in asleep as Khoeveld had been at the convent.

I was the last. I felt sleep coming near to me, but held it at a distance. I checked on Shy to make sure he was covered securely. His mouth was half open, his long lashes completely still. I wondered if he dreamed of the red mare he had mentioned before.

I hadn’t dreamed of the moon-headed colt since we left the convent.

Since the dragon.

I couldn’t sleep. The respite of the road and the security of the caravanserai gave my mind the freedom not just to wander, but to race, like a sprinter in the froth of the summer sea.

What if the dragon had reached him?

I left our chamber for the courtyard and the stars. In the center of the caravanserai were dirty troughs for animals, and one fresh pool for people, cycling clean water by some unseen apparatus. I leaned over its wall to wash my hands. The water was icy, but I scrubbed all the way up my arms, my whole face, and behind my ears. I had craved this quality of water. Washing in river water had been an unforeseen ordeal of the road, after years of heated water and mild ocean. Khoeveld had always made a show of turning his back and covering his eyes, but that hadn’t made it any easier to stand naked under the sun. Even in the clear water I never really felt clean.

If Kholken (who didn’t seem to care for bathing, and I thought was probably content to roll naked in sand, like a horse) refused to allow us one proper bath before taking to the road again, I thought, I would beat a spoke out of a wheel with a rock.

Ah, but my reflection.

I mussed my hair with amusement. There was nothing to be done with it. I had braided Shy’s, and he had tried to braid mine, but his haphazard efforts had come loose easily. I was embarrassed to realize that I had never touched it myself, only had it dressed by a series of caretakers—first my sisters or my mother, then by the contemplatives at the convent, and finally by Gannon’s artful hairdressers.

I put my chin in my hand and observed an old version of myself in the busy water. Husk had been hiding under plaits and cosmetics this whole time, I thought. I twirled a strand of curly hair in a mockery of the fine summer lady I had been.

I heard a noise, and I looked up.

A man had been crossing the courtyard to the same pool. Seeing me, he stopped short. He was wearing a fur-lined kaftan with a sash and a hood; I couldn’t see his face, only a dark beard.

It occurred to me that he probably kept his distance to be polite. I was a strange woman, after all, unaccompanied and with hair uncovered, and still dressed in Khoeveld’s borrowed traveling gear. I would have draw similar stares in the south.

But there was something peculiar about the way the man stared. After a moment, I realized what it was; if he had been truly respectful, he would not have been staring at all.

I retreated back to our chamber just as the candle ate another notch of an hour. Shy was awake, not having moved. I had thought him dead asleep, but now he looked at me in reproach.

“There was a man,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I was unsettled. “He was watching me.”

“Castrate him,” muttered Kholken. Shy and I both looked at her. Her eyes remained shut and her mouth slightly open.  
Had she spoken in her sleep?


	17. the barter at Beadcroes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _What is mortal will be overcome by life._  
>  -the Third Book of the Sundial, as translated by Aidanan Blay

For all the silence of the night, the morning brought a riot of sound and color. The shop stalls had been transformed with banners and signs. Pens roiled with animals—sheep, hogs, goats, all sorts of fowl. I was almost delighted to see the red pigs characteristic of the north, the very breed my family had kept. Medallions bearing the face of the Sundial mingled with braided pagan chains, dangling for sale, clinking against each other. There were furs in abundance, that of wolves, mink, and winter foxes, and raw hides hanging alongside finished leather goods. Dogs barked on chains. We passed a crate of hideous, roiling wytchdog pups, squealing like piglets, each one the price of a good horse. Shy had to be pulled away from them.

Kholken had tossed me in a bath and trussed me up in local garb, complete with headscarf, red with blue and yellow flowered fringe. She hadn’t done so out of kindness. She needed me to be ostentatiously local, for there was no easier mark than a foreigner. There was something amusing about it: a northerner disguised as a northerner. I felt as comfortable as if I had never donned the black frock of the convent, nor my southern blue dress.

“You know horses,” she assumed without asking. “Go find another pair of lorheads, but northern stock. Thick fur, big feet. Smile a lot. You’re pretty enough.” She scrutinized me up and down, tucked a bit of my hair into my scarf just as my mother would have, in the same affectionless gesture. “Act sweet, and even the most tightly pursed trader will let you cheat him.”

Abandoning me to the crowd, she whisked Shy away in search of something, I knew not what. She didn’t bother to tell me.

She hadn’t left me unarmed; I had a long pinprick of a knife hidden in my sash, next to the coinpurse. When I had asked how I was meant to use it, Kholken had given me a look of contempt and said only, “Make them bleed.”

I browsed the stalls where they diverged from livestock to hoofstock. There was little diversity in type or color here. There were bousons, the massive breed favored by loggers, huge in bone and height but eternally dead in the eye. There were a few of the curly-haired breed as well. Mostly there were northern lorheads, bearing a poor resemblance to their southern cousins. Their heads were still refined, small-muzzled, but hidden by thick forelocks and long whiskers. Some even grew beards under their jowls. Now that it was spring, their fur was thinner, but they would never look as neat as Delilah’s variety.

The first horse trader to spot me actually vaulted over the back of an especially squat bay. The man bowed deep, hands up, and was beaming when he raised his head. He was very old for such agility, his beard very long and his teeth very yellow (some of them missing), but there was infectious cheer in his voice. “A true daughter of the north,” he declared. “Unless my old eyes fail me. My daughter’s bestial husband has your eyes, and he was born beneath the peak of the Widow itself. What is your cold blood doing so far south?”

I almost laughed. This was the coldest I had been in years.

“Selling,” I said. His face dropped. “And buying.” It lifted again.

“I have exactly what you’re looking for,” he said with confidence. “I always do.” He led me down the rows, bragging all the way, past swaybacked geldings he swore were at the peak of their usefulness, and aged mares he declared had four more foals in them. I was sure he saw my skepticism, but if he did, it only cheered and encouraged him.

He had a variety, at least. There were several lorheads I thought would meet Kholken’s standards. I was standing one of them, a burly black thing, while the trader held up its hoof to exhibit a lack of cracks, and I glanced up and saw another man in the lot. He was bridling a dun. He glanced up at me as well, and I realized it was the same man I had seen the night before. He had the same beard, the same face half-hooded against the morning chill. He went still, perhaps recognizing me as well. He didn't break his gaze. Something about his stillness made me uneasy.

“The black pair.” I interrupted the trader in the midst of his talk of hooves ( _‘hard as rocks, never shod!’_ ). “Will do.” They had harness marks on their fur still, but they were fat and fresh with bright eyes, and bore the kind of rocky feet the man had been praising. “Will you take trade for a pair of southern lorheads? Tired from the road, but fine creatures still.” I didn’t mention their lash marks, or hocks clipped from boghtmaw teeth. “They need rest, but will sell for double the price of the black two, and more than make up for the cost of feed to bring them back into condition.”  
He squinted half an eye at me in that marketplace doubt, then broke out into another broad smile.

“Of course, of course, we can discuss such things, but you must step out of this cold for a cup of kava with my Pyla. Or tea, if you prefer.”

Another pang. The hospitality, the cup of kava to seal a deal, was a northerly custom. Kava in the south was always poured over ice and flavored with rose or cardamom. It bore little resemblance to the hot and earthy drink of home.

Kholken would have been irate over the extra time taken.

That was part of the reason I agreed.

—

Pyla turned out to be the trader’s wife, the trader whose name turned out to be Toliy. They had the same smile-crinkled eyes and gray hair, hers half-covered by the same kind of embroidered red scarf I wore. She was plump and tawny-skinned with a button nose, and smoked a seemingly bottomless pipe.

She waved Toliy away to fetch the kava, which I suspected would be accompanied with familiar jam treats, and sat me down on a couch decked in colorful quilts. For all that it was a squished and temporary home, theirs was both richly and humbly decorated. Everything was decorated with traditional embroidery and it smelled of traditional customs. Woodsmoke. The making of familiar breads. Warm honey. Superstitious herbs, hidden in a box somewhere.

“Toliy tells me you come from the north below the mountains.” She prompted me without trepidation, very curious.

“Once,” I said. “I was born there. But I come from the south.”

She knit her brow. “You have traveled far, then, and through dangerous lands.”

I thought this disreputable town was an odd place to worry about external dangers, but then she said “Ah!” and touched my hand with her soft, old one. “But I did not ask your name.”

“Husk,” said my tongue, before I could leash it.

“An unfortuitous name,” she laughed. “But a very northern one. You must be proud, to carry your people with you.” She said it with admiration, and I felt ashamed.

“Kava,” announced Toliy, returning with a tray. “And kolache.” He presented the predicted treats, jam enclosed in dough, star shaped and glazed with ice sugar, next to the cups and the pot. I took a kolach flecked with poppyseed and tried not to descend too headily into nostalgia. The texture of the dough was exactly how my mother had made hers.

Toliy waited until I had my mug of kava before starting in with business again, but Pyla interrupted him. He settled back with a sigh that said he was accustomed to it. “I must tell you,” she said. “Word carries of danger in the north. Yekaterin-” She said the word almost as if it were sour in her mouth. “-has fallen silent and drawn up its bridge. If you go to visit home, you have picked a poor season. As the snow melts, odd things climb out of those mountains.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Above Pyla’s head was a lamp in the shape of an orb, bearing the marks of the Sundial, gently turning.

“I go with the blessing of the contemplatives at the sanctuary of Elegia,” I said, hoping to assuage her worry. “And the Hillmother who resides there. I had the Sundial read to me and it spoke of good fortune.”

“That is an honor,” sighed Pyla. “And a reassurance.”

Toliy snapped his fingers. He stood and disappeared for a moment, into a tinier sideroom. When he emerged, he presented me with a small medallion hanging on a chain. He pressed it into my hands and closed my fingers around it.

“For luck,” he said. “With the purchase of the horses.”

“Toliy,” reprimanded his wife, but I smiled. I tucked the gift into my sash next to Kholken’s knife.

“For luck,” I agreed. “And to business.”

—

We made our arrangements. I would bring the caravan and its worn lorheads for his inspection, for sale or for trade for the black northerners. Toliy called for his son in law to have them pulled and curried. The man who emerged from a shed, wiping his hand on a rag, was the same man from before. I quickly thanked Pyla for her hospitality (she pressed a bundle of the kolache into my hands before I could refuse them) and made myself scarce among the crowd.

A northerner, Toliy had called him. My own breed. Perhaps that was why he had stared, and why I was so uneasy.

The uneasy feeling stayed with me even after I had gone. I passed rows of rainbow glazed pottery, garlands of herbs, rough hewn marionettes dangling comedic on strings. Gaudy color surrounded me.

And then I reached the end of it.

Beadcroes stopped abruptly at the water that bounded it. On this side of the town, there was no bridge, for the water was narrow and easily forded. It was much quieter, too.

Beyond the water was the Black Way, the true road to the north.

On this side of the water the Way was unremarkable. It was like any road, perhaps a little wider and flatter, and the trees were perhaps a little taller and a little darker. I knew that beyond it, the spring trees would give way to unforgiving pine, the slopes turn jagged, and boulders would crop up, and rock faces crawl high and rough, the hills fill with moss and darkness.

And at the very end of it, visible from this threshold of Beadcroes as an ominous gray ripple, were the mountains.

They were reaching out to me.

I stepped into the water. It was pure snowmelt, and the shock of cold immediately raced into my boots. As soon as the cold touched me, the moon-headed colt sprang into my mind like a plucked string. He was just as surprised as I was, and I felt some outreach of his soul race through me in curiosity, seeing what I saw, smelling what I smelled. He could feel how close I was now, and I felt his raw excitement. _You are coming, after all,_ thought the colt.

_Of course I am,_ I thought, realizing to myself and to him that doing otherwise had never been an option.

The water reflected my face just as the pool from my dream had done. He admired me in it, through my own eyes, comparing me to river lichens, which I assumed to be a compliment. It occurred to be that he was probably referring to the colors of my headscarf.

Impulsively, I pulled off the scarf, and there was Husk. No longer a wild girl smelling of cattle and pine, stained by blackberries, battered by forest scratches, she had become a woman. I hadn't realized. Her skin was dark from the southern sun, her hair free of plaits and living loose instead among her shoulders. There was a patience and a cunning in her eyes. I hadn't realized I possessed either, but the colt was unsurprised.

I stood looking at myself between worlds, perfectly suspended between north and south, tantalizingly close to the moon-faced death that begged me come faster.

“You can feel it, can’t you?”

Kholken had found me.

I turned, and she stood solitary with her arms crossed, smiling not at me but at the distant mountains.

“You stand in the the melting tears of the Hag, the Widow, and the Dragonhead," she said. "The flowers are unfreezing and growing upon the peaks. The buffalo are calving in the base of the valley, and hunger watches them. All things are awakening—just as you are.”

She looked at me, and she wasn’t looking at me as baggage. Her eyes were as blunt as her words. “You already know it will be a summer of blood, for your friend in the mountains has told you. Khoeveld knows it, too, and fears it. The Karups know it best, and fear it the most, though they pretend they can control it.” She snorted.

“Khoeveld spoke of a summer of blood,” I said, recalling his frantic entreaty on the balcony. It felt like a lifetime ago. “What does it mean?”

“A summer of blood is when young boghtmaws come out of the mountains, escape unclaimed, and wreak havoc on the land.” She said it casually. “In small numbers, it is easy to capture and tame them, put them to their rider and teach them reason. In large numbers…” She shrugged. “We will do our best.”

I knew the colt’s heart. I knew what would happen if he were loose upon the land, unintercepted. He was curious to taste the blood of Men.

Kholken looked at me again, perhaps knowing what I felt, perhaps thinking of the coming chaos.

“You are ruining those boots,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i live near the official 'Czech Capital of the USA' and have 'czech ancestry' which doesn't mean anything to me but I have the appropriate amount of nostalgia for kolache.


	18. the ear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Tasks for the eye and  
>  domestic matters;   
> bring up the hammer and   
> let love shatter._  
> -a Book of Odes, Corl Hallus

At sundown we left the caravanserai and quit the island town.

Khoeveld’s southern lorheads had been replaced by the squarer blacks, and Shy’s yellow pony traded for an imposing eleusis dog, prick-eared and well-furred, with a curly tail and yellow eyes. She observed everything with intent. Not yet grown, she still came up to my hip, and though she was quiet, I was grateful for the leather muzzle Kholken (who seemed to like dogs as much as she liked whistling, whispering, and hair combing) had put her in.

“This is not a lapdog,” she emphasized to us, seeming in particular to be speaking to my southern ways. “It’s a camp-watching, barking, biting dog.”

Shy had already named her Kahfik before we crossed the river.

I had given him some of the kolache, and he snuck bits of dough into the dog’s muzzle when Kholken’s back was turned.

Tuskgut awaited us at the water. He was standing ankle deep, steam rising where the snowmelt touched his skin. There was something different about him, this side of the river. His ears were pulled back against his neck, turning his oblong white head into a skull, moonshadow outlining the ridge of every fang and even his scissor molars.

The black lorheads balked hard.

Kholken threw me the reins. “The road is straight,” she said, and jumped down with a splash to go to him, stripping off her draped kaftan.

He arched his neck and raised his near fore up to his belly. She used it as a step, and vaulted onto his back with ease, only the bulging of the muscles in her arms betraying effort. She leaned forward to tie the kaftan around his neck like some sort of rein, but didn’t bother with a harness like Khoeveld’s.

I expected them to disappear in a flash of black mane, but instead, Tusk simply turned and they walked off into the dark.  
“Where are they going?” asked Shy.

“To feed, I suppose.”

The black lorheads went on well enough when Tusk had gone, when they had finished blowing and shaking like leaves, but something seemed to bother ‘Kahfik’ still. She kept getting up to stare out at the road. Occasionally she whined, but more often, she rumbled in her throat. I didn't like it. Truly, I was used to the summer dogs, with their silky furs and morose eyes. This one could have been mistaken for a wolf if it weren't for her color.

“Do you think she smells wolves?” asked Shy. “Or cats?”

“She probably misses her kennel.” I was in the middle of dismissing her when the man stepped out into the middle of the road. He held up his hands and I halted the horse automatically. Kahfik lunged forward, her bark splitting my ears even through the muzzle.

“It’s the man from town.” I realized, and cursed. He had to have seen the wealth we carried in the horses, or heard our southern origins. The black sides of the road probably held a trap—more of his kind, lurking with arrows and cord in the dark. I immediately lashed the lorheads. They plunged forward, then stopped so hard the front of the seat slammed into their haunches.

Tusk had appeared in absolute silence. From black nowhere, he closed the distance to the man in a single step, then seized him by his leg and upended him.

The man was slammed down on his face. Tusk danced around him, pawing in the dirt, playing at trampling. He was held back only by Kholken, who rode out his massive steps as if she barely felt them. It was easy to see how she had stayed on the wild white thing from before. She halted Tusk with an imperceptible signal, perhaps with a thought. The stallion dropped his head to leer monstrous in the man’s face. I heard the breathless gulping of his fear from the caravan.

“If you have business with us,” drawled Kholken. “Surely you could have brought it before we took to the road.”

“Mercy,” sputtered the man. “And a moment.” He pointed at the caravan. “With her.”

Kholken turned on Tusk’s back to stare at me. Shy stared at me too, and I could only stare at the crumpled man on the road. Kahfik continued to growl. Shy held fast to her wooden collar.

I dismounted the caravan step with a strange intuition seeding in my stomach. This side of the river, my senses were sharper; I could almost taste the truth.

I strode out to the man, and he pulled back his hood. His eyes were as black as his beard, and his skin faintly marked by some old pox. There was a distinctive fleck of a scar through his left eyebrow.

I looked up at Kholken.

“He’s my brother.”

—

Badger and I sat in the back of the caravan with a lantern between us. Kholken was at the front seat and Shy sitting behind her, occasionally sneaking a backwards peek.

Badger observed at all the boxes and barrels, the cords of grass still dangling from the rafters, a marionette that Shy must have plied from the market, and finally, at me. He inspected my face in a thousand wordless ways.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said, and broke into a grin that was more familiar than any part of his face. “I was certain mother would have married you off years ago. The way I imagined it, you killed your husband and ran away to live in a lumber coven in the high north.”

“I never did care for husbands.” I felt myself starting to smile.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said again, softly. He was looking out the small window, where we occasionally saw the flash of a boghtmaw eye, watching the stranger. “You always ran towards what mother said was vile--was corrupt and dark.”

“They’re not vile,” I lied.

“Those walls were built for a reason.” He came back harder, and I recognized my mother in his words.

I could feel the argument coming. I delayed it. “Where have you been?”

“When I left, I went to join the loggers,” he said. He refused to be ashamed of it. “They remembered our father. Sent me home. I joined the sunlanders instead.” He shrugged to indicate the passage of time. “Traveled. Traded. Married. Now I work for her father, trading nags.”

“I didn’t meet her,” I said.

“She’s abroad,” he said drily. “Her name is Sigrid. You would like her. She’s as impulsive and reckless as you.”

Sigrid.

I had guessed that by now my brother would have a wife, even children, but it was unsettling to put a name to the thought. I knew I didn’t want to meet her. I was glad I hadn’t. I wondered if my sisters had married. I doubted either of them had run naked to join the mountain covens.

“Do you know where the others are?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

We sat in silent contemplation of our brothers and sisters. Our mother went unmentioned.

“So you’re going to Yekaterin?” His too-familiar black eyes bored into me. “And the cloister of the nightmount and the foot of the Dragonhead, which you always loved so?”

I was stung by the bitterness in his voice.

“I’m free to do as I please, and love what I love,” I said. “And so are you.”

I got up and left him sitting staring into the lantern, and I joined Kholken and Shy at the front of the caravan. Shy had his fingers entwined in the dog’s fur. “Is he coming with us?” he asked. He nodded his head at Badger.

“No,” said Kholken.

“No,” I agreed.

—

Soon after Tusk disappeared into the wood, and sunlight began to illuminate the emerging pine, Kholken halted for our night and to dismiss my brother.

A small distance from the main road, Shy began to collect rocks for a firepit. I pulled out the skillet and the skewers for Kholken’s sausages, restocked at Beadcroes. She put together a small bag of travel bread and jerked meat, and tossed it to my brother with the air of great generosity.

“Nopol is a day’s walk that way,” she said, pointing.

“I know,” he said. He shouldered the bag and said, “I’m taking my sister with me.”

Shy and I both froze. He dropped a rock on his foot. I opened my mouth for something small and rebellious, and stopped when I looked at him.

My brother was older. Under the beard, his jaw was clenched and square. His eyes were stone, hard as deep winter, and he had the rooted stance of a northern man--umoving as a redwood.

“Are you?” asked Kholken. Her voice was the mildest I had ever heard it. “Know you the edict of the three families, regarding children called to the nightmount?”

“Their edicts hold no authority greater than a man’s over his family,” he said. “I will not let my unmarried sister wed herself to death.”

“You stand before a rider of the nightmount, having met her steed, a day's ride from our sacred city, and claim ‘no authority’?” Kholken laughed outright.

He stepped up, stood over her. “Your beast is gone,” he said, and he breathed his threat into her face. “In the daylight, you are naught but a woman abroad with two children.” He was more than a head taller than her, and twice as wide. Kholken looked small in my eyes for the first time.

“It’s a miracle she hasn’t already been taken,” he said.

Kholken wrenched his arm around by the wrist, twisting him around and to his knees, and planted her boot between his shoulder blades and slammed him the rest of the way to the ground. His head had to turn, face ground into the earth. He spat out dirt. She bent over and flicked a notch in the back of his neck with her talwar, to make sure he knew she had it.

“Do you think a common man can mount a boghtmaw?” she asked softly. “A common woman?” She gave him a second to reflect on that, then made her words a promise. “What God has put in these children is power beyond your superstitious, northern comprehension. Take her, and she will fade into the trees like a smoke. Fool yourself into thinking her tame, and she will slit your throat in your sleep. Cage her, and the summer sun will dawn on your door, unfathomable hunger will drag all the life from your land, and it will find your veins where you hide them in the dark--find your heart where it hides in your very chest.”

She gave him another breath, but he didn’t take it.

“I need not kill you,” she said. “For your ignorance will do so, in time.”

She released him, and he sat back on his heels. He turned to glower at her. Something lived in the anger of his eyes, something that had been living there for longer than I had realized. Where had he learned that rage? I wondered.

Had it been our father?

“If you have such power,” he said, voice full of poison. “How do the three families hold your reins so tight?”

Kholken seized him by the hair.

With a vicious flick of her talwar, she cut his ear clean off from his head.

She watched him clutch his head against the wound, streaming curses and blood. He didn't even try to stand, but scrambled away like a cur dog.

“Hurts?” she asked. She lifted the hilt of her blade to tap the side of her head--the scarred site of her own absent ear. “This is what happens when you hear the edict of the families, but don’t listen.” Her words were a hiss, her voice full of scorn.

Badger finally made it to his feet. I stared at him; unhinged, bloody, covered in dirty furs, it was hard to believe he had ever been my brother. He didn’t even look at me, not even in anger. Not even in hate.

“Don’t forget,” said Kholken, and threw the dislodged bag at his feet. He seized it in the hand he didn’t have clamped to the side of his head. I didn't know if she meant the food, or the lesson. He didn't argue any longer. He didn't speak a word. He didn't look at me. He didn't look at me at all. I watched him turn his back, watched my brother disappear into the pine in the red light of the morning, and I marveled at how little I felt. My palm prickled. Elegia's promise, and the dream of the moon-headed colt, held me fast.

The man I watched disappear was not my brother.

Kholken watched his back until he was out of sight, wiping her blade clean on her thigh. When he was gone, she looked at Shy, who had frozen hunched over to pick up a rock. He straightened up with a ghostlike expression, cradling the stone like it was fragile like an egg. She looked at me. I held the skillet fast, knuckles white. She took in my expression.

She held up his ear.

“Do you want this?” she asked. “Or shall I throw it to the dog?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kahfik was the name of my dad's white german shepherd growing up


	19. Lychold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _...lived on the border of Prinyet in the shadow of the Torchspine, where sun lives only a little, and surely it influenced his work._  
>  \--commentary on Aidanan Blay's translation of the Sundial, Sarga Meers

A bronze-headed eagle was the first portent of approaching Yekaterin.

He sat on a lower branch of one of the black pillar pines, the trees that had been increasing in number, width, and density as we went. Even on a low branch, he was still high above our passage. He alit from the shadows with a wail like a baby, and disappeared into one of a few fading rays of sunlight. Few such beams reached the forest floor, for the trees of the north were old. They had been there since before the building of the wall, my mother had told me, and the world had been theirs before it was ours. Men cut them only at great risk, for it was no small thing to cut short a life that had already lived a millennia.

My father had taken that risk and it had felled him.

Passing into the pine transformed our journey. We no longer had to sleep during the day and move during the night, for the day had turned into a continuous twilight, free of color.

When we broke for supper and for the horses, I held my hand over the earth as Khoeveld had showed me, fingers spread.

It cast no shadow.

The next day Tusk walked among us. I found quickly that I preferred him at night. In the dark, they had deceived me. Nightmare though he had been, a nightmare was nothing but shadow with fake fangs. The muted daylight turned him into flesh.

If they had ever been horses, I decided, the boghtmaws had diverged from that path long ago.

His head was oblong, almost egg-shaped, his face arcing out beneath the ridges of his eyes. His heavy jowl tapered drastically to the sensitive muzzle, where his nostrils were slits that billowed into oven-red ovals with each steaming breath. In boredom, he puffed his cheeks and sucked them tight, and when he did, the whole array of his teeth boasted against his thin skin. The enormous canines no longer frightened me. What did frighten me was what lay behind them, what I saw when he yawned (jaws opening wider than any horse’s could have) and revealed behind his tongue.

He didn’t have the flat molars of a herbivores, nor even the pointed array that a dog or cat might. Instead, his hind teeth were single outcropping of bone on either side: four perfect blades with which to slice. His kind had left forage behind long, long ago. Tusk grated the blades up and down in a motion I guessed served to hone them. It must have been the boghtmaw equivalent of chewing a nail or tapping a finger, for he did it constantly. Once I knew what the sound was, I couldn’t stop hearing it.

He seemed to know my thoughts. When I sat in the caravan, he kept pace with my side, and held his eye level with my window. Doing so necessitated he crank his nose almost to his chest, for if he held it naturally, his head was level with the top of the caravan. The distorted posture didn’t seem to discourage him. He walked for hours with his neck bulging unnaturally and stride shortened, keeping his black eye upon him. I gave him eye right back. He could not smile, but I knew there was mirth in him, either through some preternatural sense, or in the small wrinkles around his nostrils.

In the close light, I could see he had many more scars than the long one on his side that had named him. His chest and shoulders were dotted with old marks. I had seen those scars before on sporting stallions that spent their lives sparring in the rink. A sport uncommon south of the mountains, I had watched only one match, when I was abroad with Badger. The violence had shaken me.

They had only been lorheads. I couldn’t imagine what a fight between boghtmaw stallions would look like.

When Tusk persisted staring beyond my endurance, I finally gave up the contest of eyes and went to sit with Kholken.

Since she had sent Badger away we had been quiet to one another. I didn’t know if she felt some way about it, or had already forgotten. I doubted such things weighed upon her conscience. Myself, I was still unable to forget Badger’s rage— the silence of it.

Kholken handed me a bag of dried fruit, mutely and without looking at me.

The road ahead was red where you could see it, and bounded by great blue ferns, native to the northern cold. It was snowing. The trees caught any flakes before they could reach us, but I could smell them. I could sense distantly the soft gray of the clouds.

“Tusk is giving me the evil eye,” I said, digging a hand into the bag.

“He has no other eyes.” She held out a flat palm and I dropped a shriveled date onto it. She popped it into her mouth. “You stare at him,” she said. “You have bad manners, for a southern girl.”

“So do you,” I pointed out.

Any trace of a smile vanished. She put both hands on the reins and put up a wall of silence.

After her assault on Badger, I thought I was entitled to intrude on her quiet. “Gannon told me she had a nursemaid taken by the nightmount,” I said. And her whole family killed. “But never a cousin.”

“Of course she wouldn’t.” Kholken’s expression was stony, but her lip curled, almost involuntarily. “A crude and funny thing, for the Family to lose a daughter to the black service... an honor, by all counts, but also an unwelcome proof that they are as subject to God’s law as any.” I couldn’t miss her removal from them, the word ‘they’, and wondered how far she had distinguished herself from her people.

“Were you close to her?” I asked. My heart twinged a little; I found it was still painful to think of Gannon, to speak of her, even in the numbing cold.

Kholken was silent a moment.

“She was very young,” she said finally. “I doubt that she remembers. I remember her only a little.” More quiet. “A small thing, with much hair.” The silence became much longer. “Is she well?”

I wondered.

“She was happy,” I said, ignoring my heart, praying that she was happy still, and at once, hating the idea of it: her in her garden in a wine-colored dress, lamps lit, gems shining at her throat, and music playing on the lawn. Someone else's music. “Still small, though she acts as large as any man.”

“Did she marry?”

“No,” I said fiercely.

Kholken smiled a funny smile. “I can see why you two would have made a pair. Khoeveld said it pained you to leave, and that it pained her to see you go.”

The vision of the forest was bleeding; I had to rub my eyes.

“Can I ever go back?” For the first time, my voice had gone husky with tears. How unfair it was for the tears to come now, in the company of someone so cold.

“You won’t want to,” she said.

Kholken halted the horses. I didn’t look at her, but I felt her eyes on me, and I resented them fiercely. I wanted the privacy of my grief.

“Are you going to cry?” she asked.

Oh, how I hated her at that moment.

I turned, almost ready to strike her, but she caught my arm with comedic ease. “Up,” she said, and pulled me to my feet on the bench. I tried and failed to wrest my arm away. “Here."

She hoisted me up like a child, and, like setting a child on their first pony, plopped me onto the back of the boghtmaw that had come up alongside us in silence.

I instinctively grabbed mane, a great furled knot of it at the peak of his withers. My eyes must have been huge, and my mouth very round, for Kholken grinned up at my expression.

The heat of Tusk’s back coursed immediately into my muscles. My skin, half-froze in the cold, warmed with such speed that it was like being plunged into scalding water. My fingers felt burnt. I could sense the length of his strides even at a standstill, in the way he cocked a hind leg and the motion ran in one long arc throughout his back.

From this height, I could see a wind vane on top of the caravan I had never realized was there. It was in the shape of a galloping pony.

Tusk inhaled, blowing out his sides, and exhaled in a great sigh. I rose and fell like sitting on a wave.

I couldn’t not marvel at how high I sat, though I had observed the boghtmaws looming overhead so many times. Was this how they saw the world? Was this how Khoeveld saw it?

“What happens if you fall off?” I asked, freshly astounded by Kholken’s bareback riding from nights before.

She shrugged. “Break an arm, break a leg. Die, if you’re going at speed. Don’t fall off if you can help it.”

“How do you get down?”

She laughed. “You ask nicely.”

Tusk reached around, mischief in his black eyes, to nip at my boot. Instinctively I knocked my toe into his nose, just as I had when Delilah tried the same trick. He pulled back his head with a hacking laugh that I felt through my entire body. I clung more tightly to the knot of mane. It was like riding an earthquake.

“Do you ever get used to it?”

“No,” she said affectionately, reaching out to pinch Tusk’s nose between her fingers. He flapped his lips and clacked his teeth in a playful threat.

Suddenly his head shot up. His horn-shaped ears pivoted, focusing on something distant, something I could neither see, hear, or sense. He and his rider both went still.

“Fawn,” grunted Tusk.

“Lychold,” agreed Kholken, consternation in her narrowing brows.

I didn’t hear them coming, but somehow, I wasn’t surprised at all to see a new boghtmaw and their rider emerge from the fog, appearing as instantaneously as if they had been born right out of the earth.

The mare was an incredibly narrow thing, lighter and smaller than either River or Tusk, and made solely of angles, jaunt, and rib. Her gaunt face was almost reptilian in its barren display of teeth. She was pure, pearly white, and eyes were blue as ice. She was beautiful. She could have been carved from glossy mountain snow

When she skidded to a halt, it was in front of the horses. She immediately put the whole of one of their heads into her mouth.

“Let go, blasted thing,” cried her rider. He was wrapped in furs, pink-faced, with a red beard riddled with frost.

The mare spat it out with a resentful bawl. The lorhead was alive, but with wounds to its face, blood running down its neck. It and its fellow screamed and scrambled in the dirt of the road. The mare seized the center pole strap in her jaws; the muscles in her neck bulged, and the horses were immobilized despite their panic.

“What the fuck are you thinking, Lychold?” snarled Kholken. She had the whip in her hand and looked ready to crack it in his face. "When has she last eaten?"

Under the beard, he was as gaunt and blue-eyed as his mare, and little older than Khoeveld. There was exhaustion in his shoulders, which looked as though they could barely hold him up, and in shadows under his eyes, and in the fact that he didn’t seem at all afraid of Kholken’s raw anger.

“The river is breaking,” he said.

“Already?” Kholken threw down her whip. She swore.

“We barely made it across.” The exhaustion was in his voice, too, and I realized it was also in the mare’s straining neck and the heaving of her sides. There was an air of desperation in them both. The man Lychold pointed at me. “Is she the only one?”

“No, I’ve another.” Kholken didn’t have to fetch Shy, for he had already emerged from the back, and unbidden, he was holding the mass of straps I recognized as one of the devices Khoeveld had used to saddle River.

“Who’s that?” he asked, sleepy-eyed but still keen, just as I asked, “What’s going on?”

Ignoring us, Kholken asked Lychold, “Can you take him?” She whipped the harness around Tusk’s neck, buckling it here and there with great speed.

“I can,” said Lychold. “If we hurry.” He looked behind him as if he could see whatever distant thing they both feared, rubbing his hands together vigorously. He must have ridden in great urgency, I realized; he had forgotten gloves. His fingers were bright red.

“What’s happening?” I demanded again, and seized Kholken’s arm. She whipped it away again. Her eyes flashed; she looked as thought about to strike me, but thought better of it.

“The river Kouten lies between us and Yekaterin still,” she said. “It is impassable in the summer without a barge. In the winter, it turns to ice, and can be crossed, but-” She laughed, and it was an ugly, unsurprised laugh. “Summer has come too soon.” She finished fastening the leathers over my legs, seized my wrist hard enough that it hurt, and gave me a look of great intensity. “Tusk will not carry you into danger,” she promised. “Be what I told your brother you are. Be unafraid.” She smiled a quick, devilish smile. “And don’t fall off. Go!”

She spoke to Tusk, not to me, and he churned dirt and vaulted off his heels, towards Yekaterin.


	20. crossing the Kouten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _...to when that sun roosts in the mountaintops  
>  and lingers there for hours,   
> scoring shadows among the blasted pines._  
> -the Third Book of the Sundial as translated by Corl Hallus

We followed the white haunches of the she-boghtmaw, whose rider had strapped Shy to her back with him, through an unforgiving black wood. Each tree passed like a tower. Instances of forest life passed by in half-breaths: a cluster of elk— gone. A solitary moose— gone. A train of loggers and their bousons— gone. Everything disappeared into the blistering speed, everything but those white legs spurring dirt, flaunting obstacles, effortlessly navigating a thick and treacherous stretch of forest.

The part of me that was Alto didn’t have time to catch up to Tusk’s fervor. There was no room for fear. Like something caught in a torrential river, I had no option but to give myself over to the water and to prayer, a prayer that was more instinct than thought. More strongly than the rippling and seizing of his back, I could feel Tusk's glee. It was like a fever. Here was freedom — wind bleeding over your face, the violent taste of pine thrust down your throat, and hooves, carrying you far away from your life. Away from being a person.

We broke from the treeline.

The peak of the Dragonhead, unmasked by the trees, screamed high above us. Even miles away, it ate the horizon and nearly blacked out the sky with its pure mass. It glowered over the city Yekaterin, which lay as an intimidated spackle of lights beneath the mountain's crown of black cloud. The border of the city was clear; a great river stretched from the foot of the mountain all the way to the forest we had just departed, and the river was made of black glass, reflecting the lamps of Yekaterin and the lightning circuit of the Dragonhead in a dazzling orgy of black and gold. There were shapes there, in the river, like the shapes in the room of the Sundial at the convent, but I had no time to read or interpret their warning.

Tusk leapt upon the ice with a nightmarish crack, as the river broke with a boom like thunder under his hooves. We flew over the shattering sound. Tusk’s head was forward and driving, fearless, his ears pointed at the city and the mountain of his birth, as though he could not hear the river dying beneath us.

I realized the white haunches had disappeared. I turned my head against the wind to seek Shy, and saw the white she-beast in full flight, suspended perfectly between the black ice and the dominance of the storm-heavy sky. Behind her ice was falling away in huge sheets. I saw the river swallow them. I watched her fling herself from precipice to precipice, her riders small and forgotten on her back, her lips peeled back and her teeth, still red from her taste of the lorhead, laughing, laughing at the death lapping at her heels.

I twisted my fingers tighter in Tusk’s knotted mane and looked down.

In the frozen river I saw a reflection of the sky. I saw sparks on clouds. I saw the cruel twist of the king mountain, piercing heaven.

We were racing on the face of the Dragonhead.

_Faster,_ I thought, and Tusk heard me.

He surged. We left the white mare and her burdens behind, and he threw himself full-bodied over the ice. His howl was indistinguishable between the screaming air, but I felt it in my entire body. My bones trembled. My teeth were rattling in my head. Like a fool child on a sprinter, I leaned forward and grabbed two handfuls of mane higher up his neck, and I met his speed and melted into it. My bones became silent and my body disappeared.

I closed my eyes.

I could see it still: the looming of the mountain, the glittering light of Yekaterin, and the river Kouten surrendering to summer beneath our feet.

Everything was perfect.

The fingers of destiny were no longer cold, but warm, and sure of themselves.

When Tusk struck solid ground, I felt snow spray up around my legs and my eyes popped open. He pivoted to a violent stop that would have thrown me if not for the straps around my legs. Clinging to him, spell broken, I gulped air. He had turned us to face the river again. On the opposite bank, I saw a thin black line. The forest. It seemed impossible for us to have traveled so far in what had felt like moments, and yet, here we stood.

Tusk spun again, and I grabbed strap and fought the fear of falling with a curse. He faced the white mare as she made landfall. She looked unhinged. Though she wore no bridle, she threw her head as if fighting a rein. Her forefeet left the ground. “Oi!” shouted her rider. She abandoned the rear, lowered her head, and chattered her teeth. Somehow that was more ominous.

Lychold helped Shy to dismount. It was ungainly, and when Shy’s feet hit the ground, he immediately toppled over backwards into the snow.

Ignoring me entirely, Tusk shouldered the mare out of the way to stand over Shy. He lowered his head to inspect the boy. When the mare snapped at him, he snapped back with the rapidity of a snake. His teeth clipped together with a definitive flat clack, a breath from her skin. She scuttled backwards with the ugliest face I had ever seen on a beast.

“Forgive her,” said Lychold, and I realized he was speaking to me. “She hasn’t fed.” The mare violently cow-kicked at nothing, and “Oi!” he said again. The man looked as though he needed feeding as well. He was practically swaying on her back. “We have to go. Someone will be along-”

Before he could finish his sentence, his mare ended the conversation for him, twisting around and sprinting away down the shore.

I heard Lychold give one last, protesting “Oi!”

Tusk settled carefully down onto his belly. Hastily, I undid the straps that held me to slide off and check on Shy. His hood had flopped down and was full of snow. His face was full of it, too, and he was spluttering and wiping it away. I realized he was laughing.

He pointed at the river. “Look!” he said.

I looked, and witnessed the violence we had wrought on the river ice. After the fresh battering, it was finally giving way to the season’s change, parting from the shore and drifting away in massive floes.

The water was nothing like that of the ocean. In the south, it had been teal, or it had been clear, and tranquil except for during storms. Here, it was swift-coursing and dark. Its speed was peeling ice from the banks like bark from a tree. I watched them be pulled away, and it seemed that as the ice broke up and dissipated, the river was coming alive with a hunger.

“I wouldn’t sit so close to the water,” came a voice. Shy and I both turned.

The speaker was an older man, very short, with a round face shaved clean like a monk’s. He had a small nose and deep set eyes, full of patience and hinting at humor. He was bundled up against the cold, which made him look even squatter than he really was, and he was already shorter than either of us.

When had he appeared?

“Some way that the Werlaan sleep here still, dreaming under the ice,” he said. Hands folded behind his back, he looked out over the violent Kouten. “Summer comes early; who knows when they will awake?”

Shy and I swapped a look, not sure if he was serious. When we looked back at the man, his eyes were twinkling.

“Hello, Tusk.” He greeted the boghtmaw genially. “These are Kholken and Khoeveld’s two?”

Tusk grunted assent.

The man pulled a flask out of his kaftan and offered it to us. Too tired for suspicion, and certain that Tusk would have alerted us to any danger, I took a pull from it. It was full of hot, strong mint tea. I passed it to Shy and he drank gratefully.

“Where is Khoeveld?” I asked. Surely he must have reached the city by now.

“Cloistered in preparation,” said the man. He didn’t let me say my ‘in preparation for what?’, moving on with authority. “I’m sorry to have no familiar face to greet you. I’m Ayes Karup.” He inclined his upper body in a small bow of hello.  
Karup.

_‘...Adan and Ayes Karup. They are sister and brother by blood, as well as by the nightmount, and they lead it together. Ayes is diplomatic. Adan is as cruel as a northern winter. When you meet them, I suggest you find the floor very interesting. Better them think you a coward than overly bold...’_

This was the man whose eyes I was supposed to avoid? This small, mild man?

He read me instantly. “My name precedes me,” he said, smiling. He didn’t challenge his reputation. “Yours has as well: Alto, of the court of Gannon, daughter of the second family. A violinist, yes? We’ll have to find you an instrument. Yekaterin rang with music, once; perhaps soon it shall again.”

Did he mean to endear himself to me with the suggestion? I wondered. Neither Khoeveld nor Kholken had been so pleasant at first meeting. I hadn’t thought it was in the nature of riders to be pleasant.

“And you are Shy, the son of wallpainters, from Stepe.” He spoke to Shy, who was inspecting him with a bland eye that I knew meant mistrust.

I hadn’t even known that about him.

Shy nodded, but his expression didn’t change.

Ayes Karup was completely unmoved by our reserve. “And where is Kholken?” he asked.

“She was left behind with the caravan,” I said. “Is there another way to cross the river?” I’d never thought I would miss Kholken, but I found that I felt insecure without her now. I wanted her bluntness to make sense of this place. _‘Better the snake you can see,’_ my mother’s voice reminded me.

Kholken was a snake curled up on a rock, openly warming in the sun. I didn’t know what kind of snake Ayes Karup was.

“Of course,” he said. “But it lies downriver. She will be delayed.”

For how long?

He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.

“Your friend will need to be fed.” Ayes inclined his head at Tusk, still lying in the snow, which had melted around him. “And you should as well.

“Trying hours are coming.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unfortunately the song that got me through writing the river crossing scene (which is probably my favorite scene in the entire book) was thunder by imagine dragons


	21. the names of boghtmaws

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _The sun and the moon will have their reckoning._  
>  -the First Book of the Sundial, as translated by Sarga Meers

Ayes left us to one of the longhouses that ringed the clustered city, a building with a roof sharply slanted against the snow and firelight that spilled out the opened doors. Just before we passed inside, I saw Shy looking far and up to our left, and before the doors closed I saw it too: a zigzag of lanterns up the foot of the mountain, and the head of a temple, perched just above the city line. It was unlit.

Inside the longhouse was a bustling dining hall. Tables were set into niches in the walls, much like stalls in a barn, separating diners into groups of a squashed half dozen. In the warmth, the people here had abandoned their cold-air garb, and unmasked a great variety of size, color, and gender, united only by the black uniform and brown boots of the nightmount.

I was struck silent by their cheer.

Every rider I had met thus far was somber, slow to smile. Khoeveld had been the brightest, but even he had held a quiet in him. That, I had thought, must have been the influence of the mountain, for how could anyone be lively in its shadow?

It was, apparently, easy.

Shy seized my sleeve and pointed at the ceiling.

I looked up and was shocked anew. Hung from the ceiling like chandeliers, holding specks of firelight, were skeletons of huge animals. They had been somehow stitched together, holding poses as if they still lived. There was a scimitar cat, naked of flesh and fur, poised high above my head as if ready to leap. A whole elk dangled at the opposite end of the building. And they weren’t all simple beasts, I realized. Some were alien. Gargantuan.

Beasts of the valley.

“Oi.”

A familiar voice.

Lychold had returned. Only half on his feet, he was slumped on the shoulder of a woman, and he was very drunk. “Oi,” he said again, in a slur.

“Lychold’s told me you just crossed the Kouten,” said the woman. She had black hair in a multitude of thin braids, knotted together, and her temples shaved clean. Her nose was arched, her jaw strong. She was smaller than Lychold but hefted him with ease. “We’re to feed you. I’m Malix, and you’ve met this one.” She lifted one of his arms to wave it at us in hello. “Here, we’re in the corner.”

She sat us down beneath a rack of enormous antlers. They had been woven together and hosted three large lanterns, all of which seemed to be dying. The table was poorly lit, the food upon it in disarray, a jar of jam overturned and unnoticed, the tablespace dominated by a carved gameboard. She thumped Lychold back into his seat. Next to him was a very rugged looking man, with similarly shaved and braided hair. His face was clean shaven. He had, strangely, a smear of gold paint under each eye.

The man raised a hand in a muted hello. He was missing most of his fourth finger and all of a pinky. “Biraldi,” he introduced himself, and pushed a platter of black rolls at us. He tapped the game board loudly, staring at Lychold, who was running his fingers repetitively through his beard and staring intently yet blearily at the pieces.

“I’m trying to concentrate, please,” he said loudly.

“You already lost,” Biraldi pointed out. “Aren’t you going to apologize?” He looked at us, fixed one of his remaining fingers on Lychold. “This one promised Khoeveld he would see you safely across. Is it true he nearly drowned you?” He seemed to think that was funny.

“No,” said Shy staunchly. “We made it across.”

“They’re brave,” remarked Biraldi to Malix as she sat down.

She shrugged, pulled out a pipe, and lit it. “They’re all brave.” She passed it to him. To us, she shoved the bread more pointedly across the table, and asked, “Colt or filly?”

I, realizing I was hungrier than I had been in days, had a roll nearly to my lips when I realized what she was asking. The dream.

“I’ve a mare,” she said. “Black Shield. We’ve all mares.” She gestured around the table. Biraldi lifted the pipe. Lychold stared at the game board with intense and drunken purpose.

“Colt,” I said.

“And you?” Biraldi pointed the pipe at Shy, who had also been regarding the board. He looked up.

“A red filly,” he said, looking back at the board. “Can I play? I know this game.”

Biraldi genially swapped seats with him, letting him sit across from Lychold, who regathered the pieces. “I’ve a red one as well,” he said, sounding pleased. “Bashed-in Skull.”

I had to put down my bread. “Why do you give them such awful names?” I asked. I thought of Tuskgut, and defensively of the moon-headed colt.

He laughed. “They name themselves,” said Malix, as he passed the pipe back to her. The glow lit up her face. I realized she, too, had traces of gold paint beneath her eyes, though it nearly blended in with her skin. “Or they’re named in the valley, when they’re young. Besides, Skull’s not half as awful as some. Lychold, didn’t you introduce your lady properly?”

He mumbled something indistinct, his face going half as red as his hair, and it was already red from the drink.

“Her name is Massacres Fawns,” said Malix.

“Three guesses how she got it,” laughed Biraldi. I felt a chill, remembering the blood on her teeth. “Malix, who are some others? Fingerplucker— ah, but he’s a lamb.” He spoke of the ill-named boghtmaw fondly.

“Skinned Skeleton,” said Malix.

“Rotten Liver. I don’t care for her.” He held out his hand for the pipe, but Malix pretended not to see. He flicked a crumb of some unknown food item at her off the table.

“But don’t mind the name,” she told us. “Some of the worst beasts have the quietest names.”

I thought I had learned that lesson from Tusk, or its opposite. I couldn’t resist the obvious question: “Who is the worst?”

Biraldi and Malix looked at each other. I couldn’t tell if they were thinking about the question or withholding an answer. Lychold spoke for them. “The Hungry Man. He kill’t a girl yesterday. Overdid it too. Ripped off her head. Blood wasted everywhere.” He made a move on the board.

Shy didn’t make his move. Staring first at Lychold, then at the other two, he asked, “I thought they didn’t…?”

“They don’t touch the blood of those who’ve dreamed the dream,” said Malix, sounding like she was reciting a common and rehearsed line. The phrasing felt familiar; had Kholken or Khoeveld told me it before? “They have no qualms about the blood of imposters. His is an old tradition. You would think our own beasts would smell a pretender immediately, but—” She shrugged. “I guess it has merit, for one did slip through the cracks, this time.”

“That, or he’s lost his sense of smell,” said Biraldi, finally just snatching the pipe away from her. She let him have it.

“Ha!” said Lychold, slapping down a game piece. “You’ve lost.” But Shy didn’t seem to care for the game now.

“Pretenders? Who’s pretending?”

“Fools,” said Malix dismissively. “Some are poor or pitiful enough to think the life of a night rider plush, and claim a dream. The Hungry Man flushes them out.”

I tried to imagine someone desperate enough to take such an arduous journey to such a noxious place.

“The Karups are kind enough to allow you a meal, at least, before you face him.” Biraldi leaned back, swirling a snifter of something the color of honey.

I searched myself for the beginning of terror, for the ice core that had kept me on my feet and running for weeks, looking for fear of the Hungry Man.

There was nothing there.

There was nothing there at all.

I decided to fill the void with hot food, and reached for a platter of cabbage stuffed buns. Malix pushed it closer for me. As I took one, I eyed her, and I wondered. Where in the world had she come from? How far had she traveled, and what had she left behind her?

In all the voices and ruddy faces of the longhouse, I doubted there was a man or woman who had meant to come here.  
A commotion came up near the doors. I couldn’t see the cause, even when I stood, only heard the loud voices being louder. “Drunken brawling,” dismissed Biraldi. “People get restless, this part of the season.”

“No,” said Malix suddenly. “It’s Khoeveld.”

Shy and I leapt up at the same time. Malix was already out of her seat and gone, into the crowd. Biraldi was looking down into his tiny glass. “Damn,” he whispered. Under the flush of drink, Lychold looked suddenly white. He tried and failed to rise from his seat. Biraldi put a hand on his chest and pushed him back down.

When Khoeveld sat down at the table, I barely recognized him.

He was covering one half of his face with a rag, and the other half of his face was battered from chin to temple. His lip was split, and the usual shadows under his eyes had been replaced by intensely purple bruises that started at the eyebrow and reached the cheekbone, the eye between them almost swollen shut. There was a shine of blood in his hairline. “A drink,” he said, and his voice was raspy. Biraldi silently pushed his over. Khoeveld lowered his hand and the rag in it to drink, and under the rag lay a fresh burn. Sharply defined, a triangular shape like the corner of a square brand, it lay only a lash’s length from his eye.

Shy and I both stared, speechless, and I felt nauseous from the food. Khoeveld lowered the drink and smiled half-heartedly. “I’m glad to see you here safe,” said. There was a bleakness in the words. I had suspected it, and now Khoeveld confirmed it for me, in the bitter irony of his voice.

We were not safe here.

He and Lychold met eyes. Lychold was examining his face the best he could in the poor light, through the haze of his drink. His expression was unreadable.

“Thank you,” said Khoeveld.

Lychold slammed the game piece in his hand on the table and got up swaying. “Where are the Karups?” he demanded, his voice far too loud, and when Biraldi went to contain him, he grabbed the other man’s arm with a strength I hadn’t expected from him. “Where?”

“Out of the reach of your gallant ire,” said Malix. “Do you want to make it worse? Sit. Down.”

Biraldi pushed Lychold into his seat again, and this time, he stayed, tho his hands remained furled into tight white fists. Biraldi looked at Khoeveld. “What did you do?”

“Appealed to reason,” rasped Khoeveld. “But Adan has none.” He reached for the bread, but it was just beyond the reach of his fingertips. His knuckles were bruised almost black from abuse, and shaking wildly. He gave up; in exhaustion, he let his hand fall flat on the table.

I couldn’t stand it.

I moved to sit by him and pulled the bread to him, appealing to the others for meatless food and for water. Biraldi brought the water and a fresh rag, and Shy disappeared without my notice, reappearing out of the blue with sorrel soup.

“What happened?” I asked, and with more fear, wondered, _How did River let this happen?_

He watched our machinations with amusement, enduring Shy’s novice prodding at his wounds with the wet cloth, drinking soup. “The Karups are taking measures to manage the great number of boghtmaws coming from the mountain. I spoke to them about it; they did not care for my feedback.”

“What measures?” asked Malix. Her face anticipated an answer she wouldn’t like.

Khoeveld gently rubbed a bruised knuckle. “They’re going to run them into the old stone quarry. They plan to use men from the city to sort them. They’ll be fodder.”

“It’s going to turn to a soup in there,” said Biraldi in disgust.

“What men from the city?” I asked. Who, if not the riders?

“I’ll explain everything,” said Khoeveld, but his eyelids were fluttering unnaturally. Biraldi grabbed him before he began to slide.

“After a rest,” said Biraldi. “Malix?”

“I’ve the drunkard,” she said, taking Lychold by his collar.

Shy and I gripped hands to follow them through the crowd, and now the riders’ eyes slid over us like oil, dispassionate and quietly distancing themselves from the violence of Khoeveld’s face. The firelight left us as soon as we stepped outside.

It was night, so I only smelled her, but I turned my head to seek River. The sound of her breath came close—familiar, but also strange. She was close. Sensing where she stood, I held my hand out to her. I felt a wash of relief and comfort in me; River was strong, and she was fast, and if needed, she could carry me far away.

I imagined.

Something warm and wet dripped onto my fingers.

A torch bloomed up behind me, lit by Malix. Firelight grew all the way up from River’s hooves to her ears, and I looked up at her monstrous head.

Her kind and golden eyes were gone.

They were black, and they did not know me.

Her tongue hung out the side of her mouth. Blood was dripping, not from any prey, but from her mouth. She had shredded the inside of her cheeks and torn her lips raw with her own teeth.


	22. when the storm passes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _...and advised: keep your back to the mountain._  
>  -the Third Book of the Sundial, as translated by Aidanan Blay

We never entered the city itself, but followed a torchlight and occasionally stone-arched path that bordered it, and ultimately ended up at what appeared to be another longhouse. Half of it was lost in the dark. When the doors were opened, I was startled; instead of opening into another hall, it descended into the earth in a very old stairway. The steps were strange, long and shallow, cut for inhuman steps. The center was worn almost into a ramp by long use.

What lay below was a wide passage. It was high-roofed and cut clear out of rock, lit with faceted oil torches and in some places painted with fading murals beasts. As we walked, River’s hooves silent even on the stone, Malix explained that this passage was part of a system of similar passages and chambers that crossed under the entire city.

This complex, she told us, was the cloister: the home and hearth of the boghtmaws and those who dared to ride them.

We left the main passage for another on the left, with a slightly lower roofer that still hosted River’s great height with generosity. The arched entrance to the chamber was marked by another mural. This one, clearer than some of the others, depicted a large black snake with a dull green gemstone thrust in for an eye.

Within, it was arranged much like a stable. 'Stalls’ served as unenclosed rooms, open at the top and with only a curtain across the front. Some ‘stalls’ held beds, or piles of books, or arrays of arrow quivers and sheathed weapons. Others held boghtmaws.

A dark head on a white neck emerged from beneath the nearest curtain. Reminiscent of the black snake painted on the wall, it stretched out to watched Biraldi and Malix deposit their Khoeveld and Lychold onto beds. River went into the adjoining stall and, out of view, dropped into straw with a muffled thump.

Malix pulled the curtains closed and held out a hand out to the curious boghtmaw. “This is Black Shield,” she said. It was easy to see how the mare had gotten her name; as she came out of her stall to greet Malix, she revealed herself to be almost entirely white but for her black head and a broad black mark that covered the front of her chest.

“Lucky you, Fawn is sleeping,” said Biraldi. I glanced at the stall as we passed it and was glad to see Lychold’s white mare only a still lump in her straw.

Biraldi stopped to kiss the nose of a sleepy-eyed bay mare— his Bashed-in Skull. She was a beautiful, glossy thing. I was charmed to see that not only was her black mare braided as immaculately as his was, but that she, too, had a hint of gold paint about her face, though it was smeared and much faded. Her skull wasn’t remotely bashed in. I supposed some other creature’s fate had earned her the name, and eyed her dark hooves as we passed.

Biraldi left us at the end of the chamber, in the last stall, a room with two unused beds with blankets folded on them. There was a niche in the wall for a candle, unlit, and rough-hewn shelves pressed against the wall. It was a small space. There was just enough room between the beds to sit in one and reach out and almost kick the other.

“There are baths outside, down a small tunnel to the left.” Biraldi hung an arm off the curtain pole, which squeaked. “If you look down you’ll see little mushrooms painted along the bottom of the wall leading to it. If you get lost, or need something, just call for Skull, she’ll give you directions.” He grinned.

I couldn’t understand how he could be jovial, when his comrade lay beaten only a few stalls down, and another drunk on some unknown despair.

He seemed just as puzzled by our somberness. He gave us both a strange look, then continued his gesture. “Blankets,” he said, pointing at them unnecessarily. “If you’re still cold, there are extra furs in the sideboard I think, and bath clothes, and other things. And oh, this.” He reached up to the top of the shelves, where neither of us would have been able to, pulling something down and setting it atop the nearest mattress.

“If you read it.”

Biraldi left, pulling the curtain shut behind him. Only a slim thread of light came into the small square of a room.

I picked up the tattered copy of the Sundial that Biraldi had left on the bed.

A great number of my mother’s words came into my head, disconnected and unbidden, clamoring over one another. _‘You know what they say about moon-headed girls… following the smell of a dream… and they had hair faces, and bore all the colors of flowers among them, for they were born when God’s palette was still rich… He was zealous… do you know what could have happened to your brother?’_

My eyes filled with tears.

I sat on the bed in the half-dark, listening to the rustling of dreaming monsters, clutching the Sundial to my chest, and I put my knuckles between my teeth and began silently to weep.

—

I awoke in the snow.

I wasn’t cold, since I was dreaming, but still I brushed flakes out of my clothes as I got to my feet. They were fresh, distinct flakes. I must have been somewhere near the top of the mountain; it tasted like lightning. The air was prickling the hair on my arms. I rubbed them, wondering how I could taste lightning and yet not feel the cold. The colt, I realized. It must have been through him.

He certainly wasn’t cold.

I looked around for him. As I had come to expect from these dreams, my fears, my anguish, had dropped away entirely. Any trepidation was gone. The day’s events mattered as little as if they had occurred in some other life a very long time ago. Now, I cared only to see my moon-headed friend.

As I sought him in the rough mountainside, I looked down realized that I could see the lights of Yekaterin.

They were still far, and a treacherous stretch of ice and cliffs lay between us, but the torches were shining through the ripple of cloud.

The colt appeared from out of that cloud.

Ears pricked, he trotted up, despite his sore feet and overall exhaustion, pleased to see me. Behind him, a few of his kin emerged from the rock as well. They were only a few, all colts, and some of them very small still. Several bore wounds— the kind that came not from falling on sharp rock, but from teeth. They kept their distance.

Almost there, bragged the colt, who was feeling very full of himself, now that he was on the other side of the mountain. He could sense my reservations and was bemused. Soon, he would be at my side and then, he was absolutely certain, I would never have to face fear or reservation again.

I sighed.

“Why are there so many of you?” I asked. “Kholken and Khoeveld told me there should be only a few, but that many more are coming.” Here were at least a dozen, and perhaps more were hidden in the fog.

He didn’t know the answer. He didn’t even understand the question. I supposed it was too much to expect from a young boghtmaw to know the strange machinations of the valley.

“How soon?” I asked.

The colt raised his white head and flared his nostrils to survey the cold hour. He smelled smoke off the city fires, lantern oil, and sweat tempered with fear and timber wine. The vision of the longhouse returned to me— Malix and Biraldi’s coordinated part-truths, Lychold drinking like a man running, and Khoeveld and River’s ruined faces.

When the storm passes, he decided. It was an easy distance, but a precarious one. They would wait for the sky to clear.

Soon.

I reached up to touch his soft lips, unable to banish the vision of River’s blood. He felt my dread and dropped his eyes level to mine. I could see my face reflected there, and I looked young, and afraid.

He didn’t understand fear. He had felt it only rarely, and no context for understanding a fear of ideas, or of people. I was the first person he had ever seen. I was nothing to be afraid of, he thought. I was very small, with thin skin and hardly any teeth. He reasoned; if the rest of Man be like me, why fear them? He meant it to be a comfort.

“Man is cruel,” I told him.

He cackled— so was he!

I tried one last time to warn him, feeling like my mother as I did, feeling ignored as she had been. “There will be a stone quarry,” I told him. “Don’t follow the others. Don’t go there.”

What happens there? he wanted to know.

I didn’t know.

The dream vanished abruptly. Alarm springing into my chest, I sat up, waking once more into the horror of the hour.

A hand left my shoulder. “It’s only me.”

It was Khoeveld’s voice.

I reached out, disoriented in the dark, and accidentally touched his face. “Ow,” he said, and politely rerouted my hand. Much of the hoarseness had gone from his voice. He sounded now only his usual amount of tired, but with an undercurrent of urgency. “Come with me,” he said. “You have only an hour, and I need to speak with you.”

“An hour until what?” I asked, but he said nothing; he was already gone.

I parted the curtains. The chamber was darker than before, lit only by a few melancholy candlesticks that were tall and notched to mark the hour. The stalls were silent. It seemed that everyone, boghtmaws included, were still asleep.

Khoeveld beckoned me into River’s stall. I joined him and pulled shut the curtain behind me. Overhead, he had hung a golden facet lamp, and it spread warm light throughout the stall.

Though no longer bleeding, both looked worse for the passed hours. Their wounds had swollen a great deal. River looked almost snakebit. The stark blackness of her eyes had settled into dull brown, and she lay listlessly in the straw as Khoeveld knelt to attend her injuries. He took a damp cloth to her lips, gently wiping away dried blood, and opened her mouth to inspect her tongue.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said without turning. “They bite their own mouths plenty when they are young and learning to use their teeth; it always heals well. Well,” he amended. “Almost always. But we will be fine.” He turned to give me a reassuring smile. His battered features made it very unreassuring.

I knelt in the straw beside him, watching River carefully to see if I was welcome. She didn’t look at me.

“Why did she do it?”

Silent for a moment, Khoeveld opened a small box from out of his pocket. It flooded the air with the smell of lavender and lemon balm. “She couldn’t help me,” he said, dipping his little finger in the salve and dabbing it on River’s lower lip. Her nostrils flared and then pinched shut against the odor. “When they have nothing to fight, they fight themselves.”

I watched them for a minute in silence.

“Did the Karups do this to you?” I asked.

“Not with their own hands,” he said. “Well, this they did.” He pointed to the blunt burn near to his eye, almost cheerfully. “The rest of it was others. Most riders, especially the older ones, follow the Karups implicitly. They scarcely needed an order. They’ve been here much longer than I; their mounts are fluent in our tongue, the riders in theirs. When you accumulate such a wealth of experience, you resent being questioned by someone who lacks it.”

Boghtmaws ‘fluent in our tongue’, and riders in theirs? Was such a thing possible?

“They are to be feared,” he said.

“You don’t seem to fear them,” I pointed out. His apparent unrepentance in the wake of such a beating was evidence enough of that.

“I fear only what their arrogance and impatience will bring into being,” he said, his tone becoming bitter. He made a broad gesture at the ceiling. “Do you know what this city is? Not this cloister below, but Yekaterin itself?”

Taking my silence as a no, he pressed on. “It is a prison. The enemies of the three families, from simple lawbreakers, to men and women who might seek a crown, are kept captive between the Kouten and the valley. They are placed into our service; they grow our food, tend beasts for the boghtmaws, spend half the year collecting our wood and the whole of winter suffering in the cold. When they are too slow, too tired, too old, they are given the most honorable duty of them all.” His voice was viciously sarcastic. “They are sent to guard the ancestral walls themselves. Those shifts survive perhaps a month, perhaps longer. When they have finished feeding the nightmount, they feed bear, cat, and wolf, and whatever other hungry things lurk beyond the firelight. And tomorrow, they will feed boghtmaws, for Adan intends to use those pitiful people to corral the emerging young. They have never been so hungry.

“More than cruelty, it is arrogance. It will breed a generation of boghtmaws that have tasted the blood of Man. It is not an easy habit to break.”

In his speech, his lip had cracked again. He touched his thumb to i,t and looked at the blood and the lamplight flickering in it.

“The colt in my dreams,” I said, frowning, trying to understand. “I’ve spoken to him. He is childish, but he is not beyond reason, he would listen if I—” I trailed off; Khoeveld was shaking his head.

“Dreams are kind,” he said, quietly. “You will not know him so well, when you meet him.”

Someone pulled the curtain aside. River looked up for the first time and pinned her ears.

It was Lychold. He looked at the three of us almost apologetically. “It’s her turn to see him,” he said. “The Karups have ordered it be done quickly; they are preparing the quarry for nightfall.” He stood for another awkward moment, then dropped the curtains closed without saying another thing.

I stood. I looked at Khoeveld and remembered him as I had first seen him— tired, graceless, but kind. Eager to give me a glimpse of his world. I looked at River. I remembered her monstrous head looming in the dark, how she had echoed his whistle, and how she had cackled as I fled.

Khoeveld looked back at me. I couldn’t read his expression for the bruising, but I knew it was a kind one.

“Don’t be afraid of the Hungry Man,” he said. “He is only hungry.”


	23. the Hungry Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _There were no wolves at the door, for they had all been fed._  
>  -the Third Book of the Sundial, as translated by Aidanan Blay

Malix led the way.

The main passages were well lit, but the tunnels she took me down were not. Darkness receded before us. We had only her small torch, with the same faceted glass, but this one was flickering green. There were no wall paintings or murals here. The tunnels were barely wide enough for a boghtmaw to pass.

Though the main passage had been empty when we first went underground, it had at least felt inhabited.

Now, I felt that we were descending into a place where nothing lived.

Malix had been avoiding my eyes since we left the snake-marked chambers behind us, but that didn’t stop me asking her questions.

“Who rides the Hungry Man?” I asked, wondering if it were one of the older riders Khoeveld had spoken of.

“Nobody,” she said.

“Nobody?”

“Gohannam, when she was alive, but that was nearly twenty years ago.” Malix rubbed her chin. “Would have been about the Karups’ age now, if she had lived.” My next question was obvious, and she asked it for me. “You want to know what happens if a boghtmaw’s rider dies, don’t you?”

I held my silence.

She let me have my answer. “They become what they would be — what they are — without us.” The ground was definitely getting steeper. The light of her torch slanted further down, becoming pointed, like a narrow blade. “Is it not in the nature of a boghtmaw to resist blood. Without the control of a rider, they become like a wolf in a pen of lambs, killing aimlessly. The world is their pen, and any living thing becomes a lamb, to be gutted and forgotten when the blood cools.

“There can be only three fates for a boghtmaw whose rider has died. A rare few make it back over the mountain, but most must be killed. One day that may be your duty. It has been mine-- twice now. Most of us have taken part in such a hunt; a lone boghtmaw is a terror, but nothing against a pack of its cousins.”

I tried not to be nauseous, imagining River or Tusk hunted by such a pack. “And the third fate?”

“Imprisonment,” she said. “And insanity.” We had come to the end of the tunnel. “This is his door.” The green light fell blunt upon it.

It was not a large door.

Scrawled on it was a chalk drawing of a vaguely horselike shape, with speech emanating in a line from its mouth: ‘Hungry, I’m Hungry!’

Malix scowled and wiped it away with her sleeve. “Idiots,” she said under her breath. She opened a slot in the wall and pulled out another facet lamp on a slide. This one was blue. She lit it from hers with a pocket tallow, covered it, and pushed it back into the wall, closing its door with an air of finality.

She looked at me. “I don’t think you are a pretender,” she said. “Always, you wear your dread and your awe at once. It’s a familiar look. If you were a pretender, there would be only dread, rarely awe. They always taste dread once they have come this far. If you were such a pretender, I would tell you to make your final peace with God… but perhaps you ought to make peace anyway, in case the Man's sense of smell fails him.”

I looked at her stonily.

When I had said nothing for about a minute, nor made any gesture of prayer, she half-smiled and slid back the bolt on the door. She pulled it open.

Beyond was nothing but black, and faint blue light falling on a stone floor, illuminating a few bits of straw.

I couldn’t recall going through the door, only the sound of it shutting behind me and the bolt, sliding back into place. I stood alone in the near-dark. The lamp was small and dull, the facets muddying its light, creating a mirage of blue fog instead of lamplight. It made the air look cold. But it was hot.

The noxious odor hit me at once.

It was metallic, but also singed, like the smell of a fresh brand, and so heavy it made the air oily. The smell of it coated the inside of my mouth instantly. I felt as if I were swallowing it. I pressed my hand over my mouth, but there was no way to keep it out. I pictured boiling iron cauldrons, full of blood, red steam rising in spirals like perfume to stamp everything with the smell and feel of it.

A chain rattled somewhere in the dark.

The Hungry Man staggered into light.

I stared up--far overhead. He was the biggest thing I had ever seen. Gaunt, and grey as old bone, he hung over me like a behemoth skeleton. He could have split Tusk in two if he had pleased or if he were able. But he was the image of wastage. No fat clung to his bones, nor muscle hardly; he was an articulation of skin and sinew, like one of the longhouse skeletons held together in a charade of life.

I could see all of his teeth, for he had eaten his cheeks and he had no tongue. His lips were mangled to bare bone, with teeth marks reaching down to his chin. The marks were fresh, but there were many more beneath them, and those marks were old. Just as old was the pink maze of scar tissue on his chest. There was similar scarring on the fronts of his legs, where chew marks lay in myriad rows like embroidery. Almost everywhere on him were the marks of his teeth. Everywhere he could reach.

The chain I had heard rattled again, and along with it came a horrible scraping sound.

As he pulled his legs out of shadow, I saw a tarnished cuff upon his near hind. The hair there had long since been worn away. The pastern was bulbous with broken and badly healed bone. It was the toe of his hoof that made the awful scraping noise, as he dragged his ruined leg, and it slid across the floor.

“Hungry,” he creaked. “I’m hungry.”

He sounded like dust, but he also sounded human.

Horror and pity bred in my chest. Uncomprehending, I reached for his maimed face as if I meant to comfort him.

His jaws slammed shut next to my head with more force and noise than a bear trap. I felt the air whip violently past me. He breathed heavily, violently against my hair. A wad of saliva dripped onto my shoulder, hot as melted wax, but I couldn’t dash it away, for I couldn’t move. My heart was chaotic in my chest, pounding so hard that it hurt against my breastbone. I stood trembling, just like a lamb, in the gallows heat of his breath.

I couldn’t see. My very eyes had frozen in fear.

He sucked in air. I heard the breath rattling up his head and down his throat, heard the eager pulsing of his gullet— and then I heard the rhythm of it choke, as he expelled the breath in a garbling sound. Repulsed.

He couldn’t touch me, I realized.

_‘...won’t touch the blood of one who has dreamed the dream…’_

Khoeveld’s words were in my head, just like my mother’s.

I expected rage.

I expected the creature to scream his fury.

But instead the Hungry Man withdrew slowly, inch by inch. He stumbled on his ruined leg. As I watched him go, I saw his ribs rise and fell in a hopeless, stuttering breath that seemed like his last. But then, it came again. And again. He kept breathing the last, rattling breaths of a dying thing, and in the space of a moment he seemed to have forgotten me. He stared dreamily into the blue light of the lamp. He began to fade back into shadow. Blue flickered in all the hollows of his bones.

“Hungry,” he said, listlessly. “I’m so hungry…”

The bolt of the door slid open behind me, and light poured in.


	24. in the hall of the mountain king

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Waral song, Waral long gone._  
>  -excerpt from a collection of burnt notes, Corl Hallus

Time slipped away under the earth, and night fell.

We went silently the way of the quarry.

Mountain stone had been mined here in great numbers once, in superstition, before its presence became an ill omen in homes and market stalls. The bottom of the quarry was as long as a field. Not quite white, somewhat like dirty salt, the floor of it glittered in the light of the cauldron torches that were placed along the ridges. Alongside the cauldrons, boghtmaws stood like sentries, and we were among them.

I sat astride Tusk for the second time. Shy sat behind me this time, arms wrapped around my waist, complaining often that he couldn’t see. Privately, I thought he was in the better position. After all that time spent with just Tusk, or just River, being among the whole of the nightmount was overwhelming.

We were surrounded by predators.

Biraldi and Malix flanked us on our left on their two, Khoeveld and River on our right, and after him, thankfully out of reach and partially out of voice, was Lychold on Massacres Fawns. There were boghtmaws and riders beyond them as well, flickering in and out of torchlight, obscured by the night and its lack of moon. I could guess which carried the older riders Khoeveld had spoken of. Those boghtmaws were bigger, longer, and less horselike. I tried not to look at them for too long.

I heard incidences of bickering in the dark. The boghtmaw voices were almost too strange to be frightening, somewhere between the playing of broken instruments and the yipping of coyotes. Some of them clattered, others rumbled. Some almost sang. All of them snapped their jaws and loudly ground their teeth.

There was one other sound: the soft tinkling of charms, braided into boghtmaw manes and tails. Most of them, if not all, had been groomed to a high shine and decorated like the lorheads of Gannon’s estate, with some variation. Instead of flowers, there were northern medallions. Most of them were pagan. There were jingling bells, and there was paint. Something in the paint, sparingly used, caught the light of the torches and carried it with them, so you could see a boghtmaw in the dark by the blue orchid painted on its rump.

Biraldi and Malix had both rebraided their boghtmaws’ manes identically, and they both wore gold underneath their eyes, and so did Shield and Skull. Even River had a running braid. I wondered if and then doubted that Khoeveld had done it. I suspected Lychold, for Fawn had the exact same braid.

Tusk was the only one out of place. When I made a first attempt to untangle a knot, he gave me a look of such disdain that I gave it up.

“Why the decoration?” I had asked Khoeveld.

“It’s a special occasion,” he had said. “There will be many birthdays, today.” He had said it grimly, and taken a comb to his hair for the first time, which struck me as the illest omen of them all.

Below, the table was set.

Thick iron rings had been pounded into the rock. Chain ran through them. Rope was piled in coils. Men from the city were sorting rope and chain, rigging together machinations of restraint I couldn’t believe would work. I didn’t believe there was any tether that could hold Tusk or River— but then, the coming boghtmaws were young.

Perhaps.

The men were masked by their heavy coats and furs for it was very cold. I couldn’t see their fear nor know their faces. They would die anonymous, I realized, and likely unmissed. I could have numbed myself to the thought, but I did not. These walking dead had been men of the world. I could even imagine that one of my lost brothers trudged among them.

Shy watched over my shoulder. “Two hundred or so pawns,” he mused. “It’s a gambit. A sacrifice play.”

“Did you hear that?” Khoeveld looked at Lychold. “He knows that game of yours.”

“The board game?” I prodded Shy.

“It’s called chatrang,” he said. “Most of the pieces are pawns, almost valueless. You put a row of pawns between your useful pieces and your opponent. The queen, and the shah, the most valuable of them all, are kept hidden away.” I didn’t miss the meaning in his words, nor the cynicism in his tone. The Karups were nowhere to be seen.

“There’s a narrow tunnel in the rock, there,” said Khoeveld, pointing to the left side of the quarry. I could see that there was a dark gap, though my view was obscured by the men, and my eyes so inhibited by torchlight that I could see nothing beyond it anyway. “The young ones used to emerge anywhere along the river, but the two who came before the Karups were clever, and they cleared a path on the mountainside to lead them here. The tunnel acts as a chute and forces them to come one at a time. From there they can be partnered and sorted away more easily.”

“But then, there were only a few,” said Lychold. He had swung one of his legs over and sat half sideways, knee propped up on Fawn’s withers. His arms were crossed. He looked very casual for the tense atmosphere. “Now, there are twenty seven. Yes, twenty seven.” He confirmed it to Khoeveld’s look. “It’s the final count. Perhaps when this is over, one will be able to explain what drove so many.” His voice was tastelessly academic.

Khoeveld rolled his eyes in mute exasperation. Lychold pulled a flask out of his coat and took a slug from it. “No,” said Khoeveld, anticipating the offer by a split second. Lychold shrugged and put the flask away.

A scream rang out from the mountainside.

The whole quarry and all the riders along the ridges went silent.

“Just a cat,” said Malix under her breath.

Another scream came, but this one cut off in the middle, and dead silence fell again.

“Here we go,” said Biraldi with a grin. Skull danced under him, hooves scarcely bothering to touch the ground. Almost all of the boghtmaws went on their heels as well, clacking their jaws but otherwise silent, alien eyes riveted at something in the darkness that I couldn’t see.

I felt Tusk’s muscles bunch under me, too, though he didn’t outwardly stir. I patted his shoulder in a gesture I’m sure he barely felt. River watched the quarry in fixed silence; Khoeveld’s expression was the same. Beyond them, Fawn bunched her neck. Her blue eyes were brilliant and eager in the torchlight. Her muscles were trembling.

The city men scrambled up and along the sides of the chute. Watching them, my eyes blurred, the way they often did when I heard the distant colt, but this time it wasn’t his voice that reached me. The pressure of emotion came from all directions. They were not human emotions. There was thrill and there was apprehension, but I could hardly taste any of it above the bitter undercurrent that seems to come from everywhere.

They all remembered this.

A man shrieked and was quickly silenced, and that was the beginning of it.

His shriek was followed by another, and then came the sound we all had been waiting for: the high and sparkling howl of a boghtmaw raw from the mountain, tasting Man for the first time.

The unseen chute became a fervor or noise. I was struck by a memory, of the first time I had held a violin. It had been in a room full of girls who were also holding their instruments for the first time, all of us sawing on the strings and delighting in the cacophony.

“It’s not going to hold,” muttered Malix.

“Give it a fair shake,” said Biraldi. No sooner had the words left his mouth, than the border burst wide open.

Out of the dark channel they flew. The first of them was brilliant yellow gold, mane flaring white, coated from lip to knee in blood. She flew free and unencumbered. Behind her ran a small black thing, bucking violently. There was a chain wrapped around his neck, and at the end of it was a small boulder trying to drag him to exhaustion. I felt a pang of sympathy. Then the small black thing turned, chain going slack, and took a pursuing man by the throat.

While he was busy killing the man, others seized his chain and threaded it through a ring in the ground. He realized himself caught a minute too late. He threw himself to the end of the chain with a bellow like a bear’s, and then went thrashing to the ground, as a bolas wrapped itself around his legs. They threw another loop around his neck. It was pulled taut, and fastened to a ring in the opposite direction. He threw himself up to no avail. There he lay, ensnared, jaws still clacking open and closed on empty air.

“One down,” narrated Biraldi, as if it were a game.

The quarry was aswarm.

Most of the young boghtmaws had gotten some amount of rope or chain on them in the chute, and now men fought to seize them, drag them to a halt, and pin them down. A few larger boghtmaws dragged packs of men on a single chain. Already, many men were down, dead or maimed. Fortunately for some of them, the young boghtmaws were too overwhelmed to finish their kills. What had Malix said? _‘...like a wolf in a pen of lambs, killing aimlessly.’_

The easiest captures seemed to when when a boghtmaw did stop to finish the job. When they came to a standstill, it was easy to take their legs out from under them.

I looked for a white head among them.

“There she is,” said Shy suddenly, pointing from behind me. I followed his pointing finger just as she sailed past us: a long and gleaming rose bay, with four white legs and pricked ears, and a man dangling from her jaws as she sped merrily by.

“She’s beautiful.” Biraldi gave Shy a congratulatory slap on the shoulder. Shy gave him an odd look, and so did I.

Biraldi didn’t seem to understand our reactions. “She’s not so bad,” he said, as if it were only the man in her teeth that concerned us. He was unmoved by the chaotic death unfolding below. “She’s only killed two. We keep a count, see— whoever’s new boght’ kills the most, gets to dine with the Karups themselves.” He grinned. “For advice. It’s an honor, or something.”

“It’s a test,” said Khoeveld quietly. “And a caution. They keep potential opposition close; a boghtmaw’s bloodlust is often a measure of its rider.”

“That one’s the worst so far,” said Biraldi with admiration, pointing at the largest of them, a chestnut racing over white rock with tail flagged, streaming chain like banners. “How many does he have, Malix? Thirteen?”

I realized why I hadn’t seen my moon-headed colt.

His white head was hidden under a mask of blood.

He flew in perfect silence, and just like him, I didn’t say a thing.

The bloody-headed colt was huge. Monstrous. Nearly twice as big as the biggest of them. A man managed to grab the end of one rope and was immediately ripped off his feet, thrown spinning. Others were simply crushed underfoot, too slow to get out of the way, and lay prone in his wake.

The colt ran merrily on. He was racing towards the far edge of the quarry, the blunt height of the cliff—

“Oh, shit,” said Biraldi.

The colt’s feet left the ground.

Knees tucked neatly to his chest, he sprang to the impossible height of the ridge, forefeet landing, hind feet just barely reaching the top. He scrabbled at the edge for a precarious second, then got his legs under him. He was out.

The slack came suddenly out of his chain. His head and neck were jerked back, and the rest of him didn’t have enough time to keep its grip on the ridge. His own great size betrayed him. His hooves came off the rock, and he toppled back into the pit.

He crashed onto his back.

I gasped, rising up instinctively, though I was so helplessly far away.

A moment later he was rolling back to his feet. He was unbroken and undeterred, but before he could get his legs all under him, the ropes descended. Already fastened to rocks, tied to rings, hauled by men, they fought to hold him to earth. He bulged against them. They held fast. Unconcerned, he latched onto his fourteenth victim and reeled them in screaming. Ignoring the net of restraints upon him, he buried his face in the man’s chest and silenced those screams in a single investigative crunch.

“That’s him,” I said, though it may not have been out loud.

“Well, that’s it then,” said Biraldi. I looked at him, then back down into the quarry, and realized that it had all come still, my colt the last to be brought to earth. How long had it been? Seconds? Hours?

Red ran everywhere on the mountain quartz. Bodies lay not in heaps, but in scattered and forlorn lumps of brown, slowly shedding pools of blood.

The boghtmaws were all tied down flat. Most had gone still, with only a few still thrashing against their chains.

“They’re fine,” said Khoeveld quietly, not speaking of the injured men. “You will be unnerved by how fine they are.”

I looked at him. He was stroking River’s neck, his eyes holding bad memories.

“Let’s go down,” he said.

Was this how he had met River?

—

Shy and I descended on Tusk, followed closely by Khoeveld on River and Lychold on Fawn. As we went down the shallow steps, the men of Yekaterin filed out on either side of us, a small wave of what had been a much larger one. Nobody met their eyes, and they didn’t look at us.

Shy’s filly was nearest. I helped him to slide off, and had to fight the urge to immediately seize him back, as he went right for the head of the monster.

“Careful,” called Lychold. “She’s still raw from the mountain.”

But Shy, the boy who had made fast friends with kidnappers, guard dogs, and boghtmaws alike, had no caution for introductions. He went without fear. The filly turned her beastly face to meet him and I had to look away.

“I’ll stay with him,” said Lychold. He and Khoeveld shared a long look, and then Khoeveld nodded.

“I’ll follow you,” he promised me.

As we came near the hill of chain that was my colt, Tusk stopped and let me untack myself. The leathers trembled in my uncertain hands. When I had them undone, Tusk settled carefully to his knees, holding very still to allow me to get off, and remained there for a moment at eye level. He didn’t say anything, though I knew he could. I tugged once at the great knot of his forelock. He blew air in my face, then got back to his feet, nudging me once on the top of my small head with his great muzzle. He stood and he waited, and so did River and Khoeveld.

I felt suddenly very alone. The men had long since dispersed, and most of the new boghtmaws had been caught on the other side of the quarry. A gulf grew between me and the ones waiting, and it kept growing, until it was just me and the colt lying still beneath his chains.

The Dragonhead was above me, invisible beyond the torchlight, but as present and tangible as a sun. As I had stared after it as a child, it stared down at me now.

How long had this destiny been planned, I wondered, and who had planned it? Had I willed it, through the mulish magic of a child? Had it been God, distributing fate like scattered petals? _‘His whim, not our deeds’_? Or had it been some pagan spirit, half-dead, but still alive enough to drive me out of peace and into such a damned place?

Had it been me, this whole time?

I crunched over the rock in my boots to the first metal ring pounded into the stone, and past it. I walked over the carnage towards its origin. I came to the colt’s back and I stopped to compare him to the vision in my head. He was scraped from the mountain, lean from lack of feed, and now, marked by thin burns from the rope.

There were older marks than those. All along his back they lay: a constellation of specks and stripes in white, telling a story I didn’t want to know.

He rolled towards me, belly up against the rocks, and looked at me cock-eyed like a dog.

“What do you want?” I demanded of those black eyes. “Why are you here?”

If he had a reason for coming, he had forgotten it now; I knew it in him as surely as I saw through his eyes. There was a thrill within him He could never have imagined such a place! I felt his enchantment at our firelight, and his delight in the glut of human blood, how freely it had come. He had been right to think us weak. Weak, he thought, but clever! He came from a world without ropes, without chains, and he was charmed by the novelty. He wanted to know everything about this place, and he wanted to know it from the inside out, starting with the entrails.

“You’re a barbaric thing,” I snapped. A lithe thing of the forest, I had thought him, how like a faun, now nearly like an angel! I remembered it scathingly.

Reveling in my praise, he writhed his itchy back on the ground and cackled like a baby goblin.

_Help me up! I want to meet them._ In me, he saw the faces of everyone I had ever met, a rainbow of alien human and animal eyes. _I want to see all the places._ He raced back through my memories and what lay within them. The colorful facet lamps and torturous windings of the underground cloister. The river Kouten. The black pine forests, the milling market of Beadcroes, the canyons and the Waral skeleton, Shy’s land of the whales, the bison kill roost of the convent, the haunted cypress hills, all the way to the southern cities and the strange green sea, and the flowers and gentle stream of Gannon’s garden— for in me he could see all things, feel all things, and greedily, he wanted it all.

I repulsed him.

_You will have none of it,_ I swore to him. _Until it is given to you._

More than the physical restraint, this threw him, the spoiled and hungry boy who was used to tasting and taking anything he pleased. Within the valley, might was right, and here, he was the mightiest thing. Truly he was a wolf in a pen of lambs. Blood was his want; death was his right.

I told him no.

He threw himself up against the chains with a shattering scream, that of something spitting rage against a predator.

Like a little boy throwing a tantrum.

Unaware of the alarm raised behind me, not knowing that Tusk and River had closed the distance in a half-breath with their teeth bared, I observed the colt’s rage with disdain. I stood still and watched, even as he threw himself at me promising death, even as rope snapped and chain squealed, and iron rings popped out of the rock. Even as he got his feet under him.

Could he break free? I wondered. He was the biggest of them, nearly as tall as Tusk.

And he was wilder.

As he had seen everything in me, I saw the years of wildness in him. As well as he had seen a small girl astride a cow, I saw a small white-headed thing lost in the milling of a herd, and I saw a black-eyed mother with pinned ears. I saw trees with their branches buried in the clouds, trees so thick it took several minutes to pass their trunks. I saw lichenous hot springs boiling with death and sulfur, saw the springing hindquarters of helpless wapiti, gargantuan maimonto with arced tusks, alien steppes with frozen and jagged snow that broke skin, peculiar and painted caves, and looked down from a cliff into the fury of a white waterfall that ran miles long and took days to cross. I heard the scream of the scissor cat and felt its grip on my shoulders, how its claws had dug for my organs, and how its teeth had sought my spine.

How sweet its blood had tasted.

I knew the completeness of his freedom.

But I knew something else, too.

He surged up, chain dragging uselessly, jaw wide. _You don’t dare— you don’t dare— you don’t dare—_

“You are afraid,” I said coolly.

He was only inches away. The chains lay scattered. His eyes were fixed on me, full of my reflection. This close, I could see the white beneath the browning blood.

Within him was the memory of freedom, but it bore scars: the memory of the Dragonhead, and of his true face.

_‘Eyes that do not sleep, eyes that weep blood, eyes that prophesy your death more surely than God can ordain it.’_

His mother had told him stories, too.

“You ran away,” I said. “You came to me for protection.”

He was, after all, only a child.

Of course he ran.

“Has he told you of the Waral king of the mountain?”

The colt and I turned as one.

Adan Karup was identical to her brother, unmistakable from the crinkle of her eyes to her button nose. Just as small as him, she stood childlike next to her titanic mare, a red roan with a head so dark it was nearly black. The mare was almost the size of the Hungry Man. Adan was even shorter than I.

Adan Karup smiled in the way her brother did, all mildness, none of it reaching her eyes.

“The Waral king?” I repeated.

“‘The Werlaan were in the earth and the air and the sea,’” she quoted. “‘But Man knew not their fang nor their fire, for Man is to Werlaan what an insect is to Man.’ Yes, there are Werlaan in the valley, but they are not dragons. They are the most ancient stallions. They rule herds of hundreds, and that which they do not rule, they destroy. One has come too close to the mountain wall. These young ones fled before him.”

She looked over the colt in a way I didn’t like. Protection, I thought; I couldn’t promise him that.

“What is his name?” she asked.

I didn’t have to ask him. It was painted as clearly as the white scars on his back.

“His name is Callused Cat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the process of the boghtmaws being captured and bonding with their riders was heavily inspired by the Impression scene in the Anne McCaffrey book _Dragonflight_. Funnily enough I believe she based her dragons off of horses. So things come full circle


	25. the emissary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _God bade that Man take only of the good things that were provided, and warned of the danger that lay in the forbidden place, lest Man transgress, and perish._  
>  -the First Book of the Sundial, as translated by Aidanan Blay

I dined with the Karups.

There was nothing ostentatious about their food, which was simple: bread and butter aside a lamb stew. The only touch of indulgence was the bowl of koumis, a drink of fermented mare’s milk, served cold and sour. I thought that unusual. I shouldn’t have questioned it.

Ayes was happy to explain it to me.

“Young boghtmaw are used to hunting down their prey; if it doesn’t flee, they often lose interest in feeding. Bouson foals are the easiest captive food to introduce the children to, for they’re large enough to struggle, but small enough to keep them from becoming overexcited. The mares can be used for labor, and the milk does not go to waste.”

Was he testing my stomach?

They dined in a plain chamber that had no stalls or bed, only rows of books, and white facet lamps that flattered the plain food. There were no skeletons dangling from the ceiling here, or creatures painted on the walls. There was only a single wall hanging, and that was so dirty and old that I couldn’t see what was supposed to be depicted on it.

I drank the koumis and wondered what they wanted from me.

I wondered if the rest of the nightmount were drinking koumis.

They had all gone in a parade with an air of great celebration, quickly sweeping Shy away, and claiming my familiar faces. I had little time with Khoeveld. He had helped me install Cat next to River and throw him a sheep. Cat, predictably, threw a tantrum over his new quarters, splattered the sheep, and immediately fell asleep. I didn’t have time to see to him, or to be introduced to Shy’s mare (though I did catch her name: Shatterjaw).

“When the Karups say ‘come’, you go,” Lychold advised me. Khoeveld remained tight-lipped with his advice.

So I had gone, and here I sat with the sour taste of koumis stuck in my teeth, trapped between the two of them, sitting on either side of the table. I had expected servants, perhaps too trained by my days in the south, but there were none. It felt more like dining with Toliy and his Pyla than with the two most senior members of the nightmount.

Uncloaked, they both had dark gray hair cut with silver, bound in tight spirals, and they wore the same blacks and browns as the other riders.

They were so blandly cheerful that I was forced to ask the ugly question.

“Are there really so many deaths that you take a count of them?” I asked.

Ayes laughed. “Was someone taking bets?”

“It used to be common,” said Adan, taking a pot off its fire and pouring the tea. It was barely steeped and tasted only a little of mint. “Things have become quiet, until this year. I think the riders were eager for the excitement. We have our tournaments, and there is always pine beer, but things often become dull beneath the mountain.” Her eyes sought mine. “It must have been ugly to watch. “You are from the south?”

“I was born in the north,” I said, prickling.

“I thought you had the look,” said Ayes. “Our people are cousins, you know.”

I knew. Theirs were the people that hosted horse fights on the cold eastern steppes. That was a place as far from the sun as one could get. It spent half the year in darkness.

“It is true,” said Adan. “That we take audience with new riders when we think it necessary. After your colt’s display, we needed to make the gesture, at least.” She spoke as if the meal were nothing but gesture, but her actions said otherwise. “You have made strange travels, in strange company.”

Did she mean Kholken, I wondered? Or, recalling the bruises on his face, did she mean Khoeveld?

“And that colt of yours is a beastly thing.” Ayes chuckled over his stew.

“And he has seen Dragonhead,” said Adan.

_Dragonhead._

The colt had told me more of the Waral king of the mountain, not in words, but in a memory of red eyes and fearful flight. The Karups had said as much in words. _‘Yes, there are Werlaan in the mountains… the most ancient stallions.’_

“You told me of him,” I said. “Dragonhead is a boghtmaw?” I supposed he was named for the mountain. The other option, that the ancient mountain had been named for him, was an impossibility.

Ayes floated my words without answering. “Dragonhead is the mountain— and sometimes, yes, the mountain has four legs, and the head of a horse, and wants for blood. Most often he is a silence. That we hear of him now, and that he has driven nearly thirty boghtmaws to cross, means that he is a threat.”

“The kings of the valley are not to be trifled with,” said Adan. I wasn’t sure if she was arguing with Ayes, or agreeing with him. She held her cup of tea and did not drink. “But we have been in letters with the Families, and there are fears he may try to cross out of the valley himself.”

“Why?” The words popped out of my mouth. I knew the valley from Cat’s eyes. It was crystalline, beautiful, alive, bedecked with color and awe that our world knew not. He, and his brothers and sisters, had come only by the lure of a human heart and the goad of the hungry king. It was unnatural, I knew now, for a boghtmaw to want our world. Cat was as much of an aberration as I.

What would a king boghtmaw want of our world?

One couldn’t imagine. I didn’t want to. It made me think of Khoeveld’s tale of Lamoneric, and the reign of Sun Swallower.

Did Dragonhead come for a human heart?

“We had hoped that the new children would give us insight,” said Ayes.

Insight — that was what they wanted from me. I felt a funny thrill; they had no fresh eyes on the valley! Their beasts were old. Aged, and powerful, but long gone from their homeland. Cat was young-- ‘raw’ they had called him, but he had been there. He knew things that they knew not.

I feigned ignorance, even inattention, gazing at the filthy wall hanging.

The Karups let the pause hang in the air, and then pressed.

“We have sent to the Families for aid,” said Ayes. “And they send it. But, we need more than what they can give us. We need eyes that have seen Dragonhead’s shifting borders— where the shadows fall.”

“And you think Cat knows such things?” I asked as if surprised, as if guileless.

“We would ask that you ask him,” said Adan, but she was not asking.

“You could be someone of great importance here,” said Ayes, smiling, but not with his eyes. “Indeed, all across the land— even to the south, and those you left there.”

He knew, somehow. My gut accused him. He or his boghtmaw had seen into my vulnerable dreams. I felt as if I were in my blue dress again, with every breeze passing through it, but what had been a blessing in the southern sun was a curse here. The air was cold.

“Does ambition not tempt you?” Adan’s laugh was unkind. She was amused, looking at me, sitting at their table and almost refusing them. “I don’t take you for a fool. You know the threat that stands before you, for you are close to Khoeveld. You have seen repercussions. But we are not boghtmaws; if we are cruel, it is with purpose, and forged in necessity. You need not fear us as you are now.”

As I was now?

“You are young,” she said mildly. “And so is your Cat. You pose no threat, and are full of promise still. We prefer to bribe rather than brutalize. So. You are unswayed by koumis, flattery, and power. That makes you a rare thing among all these blunt minds. Will you tell us your price, or shall I continue guessing?”

Ayes drank his koumis in silence. He was looking at the wall hanging now, too. I knew that he knew what was embroidered there. I knew he had seen it when it was clean, when it was new.

_‘Name your price.’_

They should have better minded the mention of my homeland. I had been brought up bartering; I knew this game. When a man named a price, he seldom got it, and for what would I ask? No harm done to those I had grown fond of? A return to the south and to my love? What could they offer me that I would trust them to give?

“You can keep guessing,” I said. I got up from the table. “Cat is hungry.”

—

I made myself watch Cat feed upon the bouson foal. It was the first time I had watched a boghtmaw feed. Unlike one of the great cats, they did not suffocate or disembowel their prey. With some neat trick of their peculiar teeth, they slit the nerves in the neck without severing the veins, something I was certain took long years of practice. Leaving the body limp and helpless, they then clamped their jaws over the veins, popped them, and let the living heart pump itself down their throats.

When only dregs remained in the animal’s extremities, he sucked it out with the same bunched throat of a cribbing lorhead.

It was an ugly death, but it was swift enough.

He was amused by my mild disgust. Didn’t I eat flesh, he wanted to know? Wasn’t that as gruesome? It seemed to him even more grotesque, for flesh lay heavy in the stomach.

“You ought to try bread,” I said drily.

I leaned upon the opening of his stall, appalled again at how well he fit it, for he was too young to be so big. And too stupid.

_Yes,_ he said. _I am big!_

“I’m glad to see you escaped the Karups without a beating,” said Lychold, emerging from his stall; he was the only one in the chamber. I hadn’t realized he was there. He was drunk again. And morose. His collar gaped and his eyes were red.

He leaned on the other side of the doorway and gazed in at Cat, who leered back at him, blood on his teeth.

“He’s cute.”

_Of course he thinks so — look at Fawn._

“I would have stopped it if I had known,” said Lychold suddenly, with the urgency of a drunk man. “All of it. He’s mad to question them.”

“The Karups?”

“Couldn’t, didn’t, can’t, do a thing,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes, not listening to me at all. “He’s a fool and I’m a coward. Kholken would have ripped them limb from limb— no.” He corrected himself. “She would have bound Khoeveld to a chair, made him be sensible.”

“Do you ride with them?” I had to ask. “You’re the only one I’ve seen without a partner.”

He nodded back at Fawn’s stall. “Nobody likes her.”

I was swamped by immense pity. Lychold was easy to pity. He was tall, but he was narrow; I could see his collarbone in the open top of his shirt, and his boots were scuffed. He looked ill-attended to. He looked like a man with something missing.

“What did they want?” he asked. He looked at me, and through the dullness of the liquor was something sharp. “The Karups. They wanted something.”

I said only “Dragonhead,” and looked for information in his reaction.

“Oh,” he said, surprised, but not very surprised. “That explains that.”

“What’s ‘that’?”

“What Kholken’s brought up from the south.”

“Kholken’s here?”

He blinked. “Did I not say that?”

—

The dining hall underground was nearly identical to the one in the longhouse above, but better lit, and wider, with wooden tables sprawled in all directions, chairs busily scraping as riders swapped jam jars and threw bits of bread at each other. Here there were servants, cross looking women in nunnish garb, distributing baskets of bread and ladling soup. There was only one skeleton mounted on this ceiling, but it was horrific: a massive snake, long as the hall, twisted as if alive.

I didn’t see any koumis.

I saw Khoeveld’s hand waving, as he stood up out of the crowd, a huge grin on his face.

“There they are,” said Lychold unnecessarily. He was weaving a little on his feet. I took his by the arm and dragged him between tables. When I reached familiar faces, Biraldi and Malix rose as one to claim him -- Biraldi with an enthusiastic, “Where have you been hiding, you sad bastard?” -- and Khoeveld rose to meet me.

He seized my hand in his. By now, the black bite of Elegia had long healed for both of us, but I felt the memory in our gripped palms.

He grinned. “I welcome you,” he said, with grandiosity. He had apparently been drinking, as well. He looked pink and almost giddy. “Sister of the nightmount!”

He threw me down into a chair, and threw himself back into his, and almost fell over backwards. Shy was the one who had to right him, looking exasperated. “You survived,” he said.

“No thanks to you,” I said. “Where were you while the Karups were breathing down my neck?”

“Eating pie,” he said, and toasted me with his empty plate.

“Callused Cat, is it?”

Kholken.

She was grinning at me from across the table. Looking somewhat cleaner than usual, as if maybe she had been dunked in a lake, she had her boots up on a chair and a fresh gash on her forehead. She was holding a half eaten apple.

“I hear he is a monster.” She sounded delighted to have heard so.

“Huge,” said Lychold, holding his hands far apart, resisting Biraldi’s effort to push water on him.

“Killed fourteen men,” said Malix.

“Can I have some more pie?” Shy piped up, nobody listening.

“Here.” Kholken pushed a basket of rolls at me. “Whatever the Karups fed you was likely poison, best to throw some bread on that.”

I took a roll, held it, and paused. She and Khoeveld swapped glances, and there was some shared confidence there. I grew suspicious. “Where have you been?” I asked. “I thought you would reach the mountain sooner.”

“I had to stop to perform my duties.” She sneered openly. “The Karups sent for a secret thing, something only noble hands can hold. I had to escort those noble hands north.”

I followed the direction of her shrug down the table, where three cloaked figures sat apart from the masses of the riders. They were dressed one in yellow, one in green, and one in blue— the colors of each of the Three Families. I found I wasn’t hungry; after all the violence and fear of the recent hours, those colors disturbed me more than anything. They reminded me of the south, and of the grander cities on the western coast. They didn’t belong under this mountain.

“What ‘secret thing’ do they carry?” I asked.

“Ask them yourself,” said Kholken. She threw back the rest of whatever she had been drinking, and got up. “I’m going to go fuck somebody.”

She strode off, and I stared after her, and then I stared at the rest of them. Nobody looked surprised but Shy. “Who’s she going to…?” he asked, unable to finish the question.

“Whichever poor lass has prayed longest for this night to come,” said Biraldi. He took his glass, filled it, and clinked it against Kholken’s empty one. “And now, let us all pray that the poor lass survives the night.” They all bowed their heads as if in real concern.

Nobody seemed concerned with the Karups any longer, or Dragonhead; those were threats fading rapidly away against the warmth of cheer and alcohol. It was hard to be somber in such an atmosphere, but still, something inside kept me cautious. I looked hard at the representatives of the Family. They were not eating, or had eaten already. ‘We have sent to the Families for aid,’ Ayes had said. ‘And they send it.’

What power did the families possess over the the Waral king of the mountain?

In their spoilage and finery, what could they do, that the grit of these men and women, and their — no, it was our, now — beasts could not?

“Your eyes are unfriendly,” said Khoeveld. He was amused.

“Should I be friendly?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” he said. He didn’t meet my eyes, instead leaning over to speak to Lychold. Let him be enigmatic, then.

“Excuse me.” I got up and passed by Shy, who watched me go, as the rest of then turned to do. I went through the crowd of the nightmount, surrounded on all sides by my odd new brothers and sisters, and under the gaze of a dead serpent.

I didn’t know what I expected from the three emissaries of the Families; the only noble member I had ever met was Gannon, who spoke little of her people and seemed to evade her duties with a purpose. Her people wore the color green; I remembered that. And it was the green shoulder that I seized, with the boldness of someone who had grown accustomed to cold food, caravan travel, straw beds, and boghtmaws. A year ago I would have lowered my eyes at a noble passing, but it seemed I had left my manners and my fear far behind me, washed up somewhere in the southern sea.

They rose from the table, and I saw their refined hands on the coarse wood before I saw their face, and memory came to me: rose polished nails, and pale skin.

She dropped her green hood.

I knew the cleverness of those gray eyes, the wit of that pale mouth.

Something crashed inside of me.

Gannon stood before me, in the hall of the nightmount, below the black city of Yekaterin, beneath the yawning face of the Dragonhead. Her face was barren of color. She wore no jewels, no flowers. Her yellow hair was in a single braid and coming loose, with wisps of it floating free by her ears. She looked different for the road— perhaps paler. Perhaps thinner. But no smaller, no weaker, no less herself.

But there was something new in her — something bolder.

Her chin jutted, as it always did when she took offense, and her eyes sparkled as she swept my hand away. Her shoulders said ‘How dare you!’, and her straightened back dared further transgressions on her noble self.

The estate and its gardens came back to me in a horror, and I was awash in memories of perfumes, persimmons and pear cake, Gannon’s borrowed red wine dress and my blue gown, the violin and the sunlight off the sea, and standing on the bridge looking into the water where she had told me _‘You may go home, if you like…’_

I stared at her in a horror of the time that had passed, and in vicious awareness of my uncleanliness, my unbraided hair, my coarse clothing. My cheeks were afire in shock and shame.

She looked up at me in the picture of haughtiness, and then, her eyes gave her away.

Her fingers touched mine.

Ruse put aside, her eyes were soft as clouds and softly, they questioned me. She smiled. She smiled, looking at my face piece by piece, recalling every part of me, and her smile only grew broader. She had a thousand questions for me.

She only asked one.

“Are you still my Alto?”

I was nothing but hers.

I freed my hands, ran my fingers up her neck, over her cheeks, and I cupped her face and kissed her.


	26. the Bane of Lamoneric

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _...he hasn't climbed the wall yet, but he knows. Security is a waste. Safety is a waste. He is opening his veins. When the truth comes, brilliant like the first light of the sun... you will open your eyes, too._  
>  -excerpt from a collection of burnt notes, Corl Hallus

Even so far from her home on the sweet-smelling sea, Gannon still hadn’t lost the faint smell of lilac and smoked vanilla, nor the faintest tickle of salt. I could taste it in my nose and on my lips.

I told her so.

“You have either a very keen, or very imaginative nose,” she said. “I don’t remember the last time I wore perfume, or washed with anything but cheap oil soap.”

It was dark for a single facet lamp, deep purple, gently illuminating the small room that Gannon had been given. It was not much plusher than my own quarters, but it was private. It was quiet. I could hear her breathing, and if I turned my cheek to her bare chest, I could hear her heart beating. Like a boghtmaw, I thought I could hear her very veins, as I lay alongside her in their warmth. She ran her fingers down my side and rested them softly on my hip. I felt like something sparkling in the dark.

“You smell like boghtmaws.” She laughed.

She propped herself up on one elbow. The faceted purple lit every inch of her. She pushed back her tousled hair, then pushed back mine, letting her fingers linger in it. “Like you said before— just like a blacksmith. All sweat and iron.” She grinned, and grinned more when I flushed, knowing she had plenty to do with that sweat. She had forbade me the blanket, and kept on the light, declaring that we had to make up for ‘years of chastity’, and, well, I felt purged of my chastity, thoroughly.

“Tell me everything,” she had said, and when I had my wits back, I had, everything from the convent to Callused Cat. But now it was her turn.

“What happened after I left?” I asked.

A darkness crossed her face.

“After you left,” she said. “I wanted to drink, but I’ve always been a clear-headed drunk, and I didn’t want to be clear-headed. I found the next best distraction. Can you guess?”

I thought immediately of a man, and she must have read it in my face; she laughed.

“Sprinters,” she said.

I didn’t understand her. “The races? Betting?”

“I went to visit Harmonium Blay, and I said, ‘find me a horse’,” she said. “‘A fast horse.’ He refused, but I pressed him, and he found me a fast horse: a wild half-breed who knew how to run and nothing else. I took him to the races.”

“...and found a boy to ride him?” I asked hopefully. Her grin belayed that.

“I rode him.”

I was appalled. “Nobody stopped you?”

“Nobody stops me doing something that please,” she declared, some of her family’s flame showing in her eyes. “Harmonium especially begged me reconsider, as he’d sold me the horse, and I’m sure he thought me dead when I took the short track.”

I was doubly appalled. I propped myself up on my elbow to stare at her. I may have been glaring.

Sprinting was a chaotic sport with no real track at all, a mad dash to a randomly declared destination. The first to reach that destination was the winner. That was the only rule. The wisest riders (and even the stupid ones who knew just enough to save their skin) took a weaving or ‘long’ track, disrupting travelers and merchants as they spoiled the roads and cut across growing fields, raising clouds of dust destroying crops.

The ‘short track’ was a straight line.

It was a lucrative but ultimately deadly risk, usually full of thickets, ditches, deep water, and all other sorts of natural treachery. Sprinting was already dangerous enough. The horses were bred and bought for speed, not brain, and could hardly be trusted to take a flat road. To choose the short track accounted to a kind of suicidal mania.

“You’re mad,” I accused. “How many races did you run? How many falls did you take?”

“Not many falls,” she said. “It’s easier,” she explained. “When you let the horse have its head and its feet, and stay out of his way, instead of whooping and flailing the lash for the benefit of the crowd.”

I made a face at that. How many times had we chagrined the boys for doing so? It was a common complaint among the girls and women of the estate, and often a convenient way to dodge a marriage, saying ‘Oh, but he whips his horses so!’.

“I ran twenty-three,” she said. My heart could have stopped. Twenty-three races? “I fell the first five times. I won the rest.”

“How?” I demanded.

“Once you master the short track, the race is already won.” She shrugged, as if there were no other trick for it, but I knew what her silent smugness looked like. “As long as your mount is sure-footed. They called me a cheat, of course— when I wasn’t there to hear it. That, or that the other riders went easy on me for being a woman.” She laughed. “As if there was anything womanly about it. I don’t think I have ever been such a mess, not even as a child— going about in trousers like a man, hair in a knot, spattered with mud and red-faced from the wind and the branches that struck my face. You aren’t the only one who thought me mad.”

“And you’re sure you aren’t? You sound like you need a month in the convent.”

“Mad with love, perhaps,” she said, making me flush again. She kissed my neck, and I nearly became extremely distracted again, but I had to stop her and finish my questions. The world was too much of a puzzle to give myself over to her arms entirely yet.

“Why are you here? The Karups said little, only that the Families were sending aid. Are you that aid?”

She pulled back, looking puzzled. “Hasn’t Khoeveld told you?”

“Nobody,” I said with exasperation. “Has told me anything.

“Did you tell you the tale of Lamoneric and Sun Swallower?” Her voice was soft again, but not with tenderness. The room was quiet but for her breath. “He told me that one years ago,” she said. “When he and River were new to their duties, and I was as well. I didn’t know then what unnatural power my Family held.”

“Which power?”

“The Bane of Lamoneric.”

I recalled what I could of the tale: Lamoneric’s conquest, his fall, and his mare’s death by sunlight.

“I thought it was just a story,” she said. “But there remains a relic: the Bane of Lamoneric itself, the very wytch-bridle that was used to capture and subdue Sun Swallower, woven of valley grass, white with age, bedecked with barbarian gold. They say it can bend the will of any boghtmaw. No matter how cruel, hungry, or ancient.”

In the haze of this dark place, and the warmth of her skin, I could only suppose it to be true, for I could no longer bring myself to question any strange thing. The whole world was a strange thing to me now.

“How?”

“Old magic,” she said.

I thought of Scatterhorse, and of black Elegia, and the cascade of light in the reading room of the convent. I thought of the pagan medallion Toliy had given me in the name of business, buried somewhere in the small parcel of my belongings.

“They intend to capture Dragonhead,” I realized.

“The mountain?” She was puzzled.

I was pleased to be the one explaining something, for once. “He is one of the Werlaan: a king stallion of the valley. He has come too close to the wall, which is what has upset the seasons, and driven so many boghtmaws out of the valley.”

Her brow furrowed. For the first time since I had seen her, worry was in her eyes.

“I had hoped it was politics,” she admitted. “I don’t wish civil war on anyone, but the nightmount is due for a change in leadership. Power under the mountain yields only in the face of greater power.” She searched my face in the near-dark, brushing her knuckles over my cheek.

“What is your role in this?” she murmured.

I bit my tongue.

—

“Hello,” crooned Gannon. “Look at you. Aren’t you handsome?”

Callused Cat, put off by Gannon’s sweet smell and southern kindness, lurked in the back of the stall with his reservations. I watched him like a hawk. He was sodden with bouson blood and not hungry, but I promised him castration and a generally slow death if he touched her.

And he had better be kind, I reminded him.

He was begrudgingly polite. He gave her palms a sniff, then flared his upper lip.

“He’s grand,” said Gannon. She was grinning like a child, and she even looked like one, next to him. “And enormous. How old is he?”

Cat did appreciate the praise. He arced his neck and blew out his nose. He gave me a sidelong look, to be sure I knew how grand and enormous he really was, and I couldn't even chide his ego. I felt a small thrill. He _was_ grand. He was grand, and he was mine, and Gannon thought he was handsome.

“He’s probably about nine,” said Khoeveld. He was leaning on River’s stall, and she leaning her huge head on his shoulder, effectively pinning him to the wall. She was sleepy-eyed and absentmindedly lipping his shirtfront. “Not more than two or three in lorhead years. They’re almost as slow to mature as man. River is only twenty, Tusk perhaps thirty. We can’t know for sure; they don’t count years the same way we do.”

“How old can they get?” asked Shy. He sat cross legged on the ground across from Lychold. There was a game of chatrang ongoing between them.

“We don’t know,” said Khoeveld, at the same time Lychold said, “Centuries, maybe.”

Khoeveld shot him a look, the kind he seemed to reserve only for Lychold. It was strange to see him scowl. Apparently people liked Lychold as little as they liked his mount.

Fawn, unfortunately, was awake too. Her head poked out from between her curtains, and only her head, shining and pearlescent. “Older,” she crackled. Her voice was unnerving deep and strong, especially coming from such a delicately framed creature. She was the most articulate of all the boghtmaws I had met and I hated it. She didn’t speak much during the day except to Lychold, but at night, I could hear her whispering to him through the curtains.

“How much older?” asked Shy. He was, of course, completely unafraid of her.

“Old as the mountains,” she grated.

“She’s not being completely honest,” said Lychold. “But she is telling the truth, as she understands it.” He made a move on the board, knocking over one of Shy’s pieces. “She’s known of Dragonhead as long as she’s lived— as long as she’s known the mountains. She was a member of his band, once.”

“You never told me that,” accused Khoeveld.

Lychold shrugged. “It didn’t matter before. When spring began, and he became a danger, well, you were gone then, weren’t you?” He didn’t look up from the board, but there was accusation in his voice, too.

Gannon faced Fawn with crossed arms. She wasn’t much scared of the mare, either. “They intend to capture him,” she said. “You know him best; how do you think they will fare?”

“You will all die,” said Fawn with confidence.

“That’s enough from you,” said Lychold. He gave his mare a stern look. “Hush.”

“You lose in two moves,” she snarked back, and retreated behind her curtain.

Lychold frowned at the board and moved a piece. Sure enough, almost guiltily, Shy made his own move, and knocked over Lychold’s shah.

—

I didn’t dine with the Karups, this time. I found them on my own.

I followed the thin scent-trails of blood, familiar and unfamiliar, through the myriad of passageways than ran beneath the city. Cat could taste them all, and with the guidance of his elders, he guided my way, to where Ayes sat in monklike contemplation of a great stone.

He sat in a small and roughcut room. There was no light but the orb he held, and he had draw the cover almost entirely shut, letting only a tiny line of gold cut the room in half. There were no chairs, only the cold rock ground, not even covered with a matt or swept clean of dust. The boulder sat on a slightly raised dais and consumed the space. It must have been there since the cloister had been cut into the rock, for there was no route in or out for something of that size.

I closed the door and set my own lamp aside, sliding shut the grate to throw the room into the black of the deepest cavern. It took my eyes long minutes to adjust. The gold line of Ayes’s lamp made it nearly impossible. When your eyes began to see the stone beyond it, they would touch the line and be scorched by it, making you blink, leaving afterimages.

I knelt a few steps behind him and to his left. I put my hands on my knees just as I had once in the convent— in contemplation. Scatterhorse would have approved of how long and how well I kept my silence. Let me be as wise as her, I thought, and as strong.

“You prefer to barter with me and not my sister?” asked Ayes.

“Which of you summoned Gannon?”

I sensed his crinkle-eyed smile in the darkness. “That was no threat,” he said. “And we mean her no harm. It was merely an instance of our aligning interests. We needed an emissary, and you needed a reminder of the world left behind. You can never forget that this place beneath the memory is only refuge and mysticism, Alto. Forget the world, strive for the mountaintop, and the lack of air will choke your young lungs. Think of the world, be humble, and you will live long.”

“You tempted me with ambition, before,” I said.

“You were wise to scorn it,” he said. “Unless you come to claim it now?” Was his voice sly? Were his words bait?

_‘I don’t wish civil war on anyone, but the nightmount is due for a change in leadership. Power under the mountain yields only in the face of greater power.’_

“I came to do my duty.”


End file.
